Bavarian Cloth Seals in Hungary

Maxim Mordovin*

Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Archaeological Sciences

 

The import of cloth was one of the most important sectors of international trade throughout the European Middle Ages and early modern period. Its history and impact on medieval economies have been studied by scholars for quite a long time, creating the impression that there are no new sources waiting to be found. Improved methods of archaeological excavations, however, have produced data significant to the international trade connections. This data was hidden in small leaden seals that were attached to the textile fabrics indicating their quality and origin. In this paper, I examine the cloth seals originating from Bavaria that have been found so far in the Carpathian Basin and compare the information provided by them with that already known from the available written sources. This comparison leads to several important conclusions. Perhaps most importantly, the dating range of the known cloth seals can be convincingly limited within the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for all the nineteen known textile production centers. Also, the cloth marked by these seals indicates that some serious changes arose in textile consumption at the end of the Middle Ages. In this study, I identify some new places of origin not mentioned in the written sources and trace their distribution in the medieval Kingdom of Hungary.

Keywords: international trade, textile production, medieval Bavaria, cloth seals, cloth and linen trade

Introduction

The reshaping and transformation of the Western European economy in the late Middle Ages had several consequences, including an increase in the role of the southern German and Silesian textile industry1 and an ever greater presence of its fabrics on the Hungarian markets.2 By the end of the Middle Ages, the cloth import of the Kingdom of Hungary had become dominated by the production from the Holy Roman Empire, and a large portion of these fabrics consisted of cloth from southern Germany.3 The appearance of such textiles and the changes in their temporal and geographical distribution can be very clearly traced in the contemporary written sources. Fortunately, this part of the research has already been successfully accomplished by scholars of Hungarian medieval economic history, such as György Székely and Walter Endrei. Székely evaluated the available written sources on German cloth in Hungary in his 1975 article,4 and Endrei discussed the “rest” of the archival material in his book published in 1989.5

In this paper, I introduce a new – archaeological – type of source in the research on late medieval and early modern Hungarian cloth imports. This source is a group of small lead seals, which can help in identifying the origins of particular finds.6 These seals, however, indicate the provenance of the product, but not the route by which it was transported or the origin of the merchants. Certainly, I am not the first person to notice the significance of such finds in the region. Along with the work of Walter Endrei, some articles on the subject were written by Lajos Huszár, Ján Hunka, Radu Popa, and others.7 Nevertheless, the number of cloth seals in the last two decades has increased significantly, enabling one to pursue more detailed research according to smaller regions of the provenance of such finds.8

Although the cloth seals are very well known and widely evaluated in the Western scholarly literature, until about ten years ago their significance as a source was greatly underestimated in East Central Europe.9 The use and function of these seals and the institutional background of the authentication process in the larger textile centers are thoroughly analysed and described in the works of Nicolaas Wilhelmus Posthumus, Geoff Egan and Dieter Hittinger.10 Here, therefore, I concentrate only on the seals as a new type of source omitting the details of the production process.

The last two decades of archaeological excavations and the intensive use of metal detectors (both legally and illegally) in several countries of the Carpathian Basin have produced a relatively large number of cloth seals the provenance of which lie in very different European regions, including Flanders, the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire, Bohemia, Silesia, Italy, etc. A significant group among them consists of finds connectable to the southern German regions, most of all to present-day Bavaria.

The borders of the huge number of principalities, counties, and duchies were continuously changing throughout the history of the Holy Roman Empire, so it is very hard to choose a single larger political-historical unit within the southern German region. This persuaded me to do an analysis of the items from the medieval and early modern finds that can be connected to the cities of the present-day Free State of Bavaria. Modern Bavaria includes parts of the historical regions of Franconia, Upper Palatinate, and Swabia. Unfortunately, the limits of the present study do not permit me to evaluate the whole German territory.

The temporal frames of the analysis are given by the dating of the earliest and latest known cloth seals provenanced from Bavarian cities. Thus, at the present stage of the research, the period in question can be limited to the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

In his 1975 article, György Székely mentions six southern German cities as origins of cloth exports to Hungary: Bamberg, Eichstätt, Schwabach, Ulm, Nuremberg, and its suburb, Wöhrd. All of them appear in the contemporary written sources evaluated by Székely.11 He at the same time emphasizes that despite the obvious and well-known significance of textile production of Augsburg, he found no written evidence indicating that its cloths ever made it to Hungary.12 Endrei names eight additional Bavarian cities: Dinkelsbühl, Isny, Kempten, Memmingen, München, Öttingen, Rothenburg, and Waldsee. Altogether, the available Hungarian written sources give us a list of fourteen textile production centers, which undoubtedly exported their fabrics to the Kingdom of Hungary in the period beginning in the fourteenth century and ending in the seventeenth.

Nevertheless, the total number of cities in the region in question that produced textiles in the late Middle Ages and early modern time was much higher. According to Rudolf Holbach’s monograph, at least 46 settlements had significant cloth industry.13

The Purely Written Evidence (Bamberg, Eichstätt, Öttingen, and Wöhrd)

Some of the aforementioned places, such as Bamberg, Eichstätt, and Wöhrd, can be discussed very briefly. Despite their intensive and significant cloth production in the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries, so far no archaeological evidence has been found indicating that their fabrics were sold in Hungary. No cloth seals from these cities have been found so far in any other parts of Europe. This is surprising because their cloth fabrics are mentioned relatively frequently in the Hungarian written sources.14

The cloth of Bamberg as Pabenperger is first mentioned in the so-called Sybenlinder-register from 1436.15 This register was compiled by Hans Sybenlinder, the royal castellan of Óbuda and Solymár in 1436, and it specified the tariff articles imported to Hungary. According to it, the Bamberg cloth appeared as the second-to-last cheapest item.16

The situation with Eischstätt, Öttingen, and Wöhrd on the one hand, was similar to that of Bamberg since no indisputably identifiable cloth seals connected to these cities have been found so far. On the other hand, the state of the research is a bit worse, because their fabrics are only rarely mentioned in the available written sources. The largest of the three cities is Eichstätt. Goods from Eichstätt appear in the Sybenlinder account in 1436 (de panno Achsteter) among the cheapest articles.17 The other known source for its cloth is the 1457–58 custom register from Pozsony (Pressburg, today Bratislava, Slovakia) – tuch aechstetar.18 The quality of the cloth imported to Hungary from Eichstätt can be considered medium according to the duties paid for it.19 Öttingen appears in the sources only in the sixteenth century, alongside other southern German linen fabrics traded in Hungary by the Funck Trading Company. Balázs of Csepreg (Walasch zu Tschapring) bought twenty rolls between 1517 and 1522.20

The identification of Wöhrd was problematic even in the written sources. György Székely was the first person who convincingly identified the werderÿn, werder cloth as a product of a Nuremberg-suburb, present-day Wöhrd. Known as an important textile production settlement, its fabrics appear in the Hungarian sources as early as the first half of the fifteenth century: in the Sybenlinder account21 and in the Pozsony custom register.22 They are mentioned in custom registers and north-western toll accounts from the end of the century in Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt, today Sibiu, Romania).23 Most probably, its disappearance from the later sources and the lack of the cloth seals can be explained by the fact that from the end of the Middle Ages the craftsmen of Wöhrd were actually citizens of Nuremberg. Therefore, they produced the same sort of cloth as the imperial city and – most probably – sealed it the same way. The regulations of the Nuremberg City Council from 1489 and 1522 clearly imply this practice,24 and behind some of the Nuremberg seals, actually Wöhrd may be hiding (see the Nuremberg chapter).

Written and Probable Archaeological Evidence (Schwabach, Isny, Kempten)

The cloth from Schwabach is mentioned only once in the Hungarian sources. In 1501, the royal city of Bártfa (today Bardejov, Slovakia) was allowed to pay part of its taxes in cloth from Schwabach.25 The coat of arms of Schwabach depicts two crossing beer kettles with long handles combining the lion and the symbol of the Hohenzollern family (Quarterly Argent and Sable).26 This coat of arms is interesting because a similar but very damaged image is familiar from two cloth seals. Both of them are stray finds but while the find location of the first is unknown (somewhere in south-eastern Hungary), the second one was discovered in the vicinity of Szolnok. The image visible on the obverse side depicts two crossing rods with some kind of basket at the ends. Thus, it resembles the charge of the Schwabach coat of arms. The background of the escutcheon is quarterly indicating the two different tinctures of the Hohenzollern coat of arms. According to the fragments of an inscription on the seals they can be dated to the late fifteenth or the sixteenth century (Fig. 1a).

Another city of origin which might be traceable among the archaeological finds is Isny im Allgäu. The coat of arms of Isny includes a one-headed eagle holding a smaller escutcheon with a horseshoe.27 No sources have been published on this in detail yet, but Endrei mentions the appearance of aisner or eisner linen fabrics in Hungary.28 So far, only one cloth seal can be connected with Isny. It was found on the site of a deserted village destroyed in the late sixteenth century, located near Nagyszénás in south-eastern Hungary. The obverse side of the seal shows a well-executed horseshoe in a pearled circle, and a one-headed eagle-like bird can be seen on the reverse side. Since this is the only such find known both in and outside Hungary, the identification cannot yet be confirmed. It is not possible to date the find more precisely than sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century based on the style of the details and the ante quem dating given by the destruction of the settlement (Fig. 1b).

The third more-or-less probable identification concerns the products of Kempten. The linen fabrics of the city were well known in the sixteenth century,29 and they can be traced on the Hungarian markets.30 The coat of arms of Kempten is party per pale with a demi-eagle and a tower31 or party per pale with a double-headed eagle united by a crown (without a tower).32 The cloth seal identifiable as being from the Kempten linen or fustian is very damaged. However, the impressions on the obverse side recognisable as a double-headed eagle (without the crown) and a small fragment of a tower. The precise find location of the item is unknown but it was discovered in the vicinity of Szolnok, most probably beside a crossing over the Tisza River. There is no firm evidence to date this find. Only the bent sides of the escutcheon with the eagle suggest the sixteenth or seventeenth century (Fig. 1c). Cloth seals from Kempten have been found in Bremen (Germany),33 London,34 and Salisbury35 but all three of them are quite different from the Hungarian one. The German find and the one from London can be dated to the seventeenth century, while the item from Salisbury is undated.

The Most Popular Cloth in Hungary (Nuremberg)

According to the fifteenth–sixteenth-century registers, Hungary had the most intense relationship with Nuremberg, of all the Bavarian cities in that period.36 This is indicated not only by the large amount of different goods imported from the city37 but also by strong family relations of the Nuremberg and Hungarian urban patriciate.38 Cloth imports played a significant role in this.

The written evidence documents the appearance of the Nuremberg fabrics on the Hungarian markets as early as the fifteenth century. The earliest reference to this can be found in the custom register of Pozsony from 1457–1458, which mentions medium quality cloth from Nuremberg. In 1497, the fabrics of the city appeared in the Saxon region of Transylvania.39

From the first quarter of the sixteenth century, the import of the Nuremberg cloth production increased significantly, a process which is reflected in the custom registers. At the same time, the available written sources report on at least two types of cloth brought from Nuremberg: more expensive long and medium-priced short fabrics.40 These products are often mentioned in the custom accounts of Brassó (1529–56, Kronstadt, today Braşov, Romania) and Zsolna (1530–31, today Žilina, Slovakia). The local regulations of Kolozsvár (Klausenburg, today Cluj-Napoca, Romania) also recorded two types of the Nuremberg cloth.41 It seems that from the 1540s the import of the higher quality textiles into Hungary became dominated by the cloth from Nuremberg. Thus, Nuremberg provided 73.67 percent of the more expensive fabrics but only 4 percent of the medium-quality fabrics, and even including the cloth from Wöhrd this figure climbs only to 16 percent. At the same time, there were no Nuremberg textiles within the cheapest group.42 The intensity of this trade was so important that the German city became seriously dependent on sales in Hungary. The collapse of the Hungarian market in the late sixteenth century caused notable financial difficulties in Nuremberg.43

Despite the wars and financial obstacles, from the mid-sixteenth century onward the cloth from Nuremberg was the most popular higher quality textile in the Kingdom of Hungary. It is mentioned in hundreds of letters and inventories, even if in some cases the contemporaneous spelling of the Nuremberg cloth may be confusing, causing it to be conflated with the cloth from Löwenberg (today, Lwówek Śląski, Poland).44 In 1551, the Transylvanian Chamber of Salt paid its employees (salt cutters) with short lurnberg cloth. During the Ottoman wars, this cloth was transported to occupied territories and sold there by the Hungarian merchants throughout the second half of the sixteenth century.45

The cloth production of Nuremberg was thoroughly analysed in 1993 by Hironobu Sakuma. According to his monograph, the textile was produced and dyed here from the late thirteenth century onward, while the differentiation of the fabrics began in the following centuries. Sources from 1504 already mention seven sorts of cloth produced in the city.46

The practice of sealing the local products first appears in the archival sources in ca. 1300 but with no indication of whether wax or lead seals were used.47 The earliest reference to detailed regulation dates to the second half of the fifteenth century. According to this regulation, at the time, the quality of the cloth was indicated by the number of lead seals. There were three sorts, which had respectively one, two or three seals. Unfortunately, the source does not discuss the imprints on the seals.48 By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the information concerning the seals becomes more detailed. The table given below summarizes the available data concerning the seals used for the Nuremberg cloth49

 

Table 1. Types of the Nuremberg cloth sealed according to the regulations

Bleached cloth	15th	Seal with a cross	single seal1
Dyed cloth		Seal with N	three seals according to the three examiners2
Dyed cloth of different origin but examined in Nuremberg	15693	Painted N and F.A.R.B.	no lead seals, except those traded in Italy. They received a usual N
Fustian		Ox, Lion, Grape and Letter
English wool 1		Saint Lawrence and Imperial Eagle
English wool 2		Coat of arms of Nuremberg, twice
English wool 3		Divided coat of arms of Nuremberg and N
English wool (other cloth)	15704	N and Shield [probably the coat of arms of the city without the eagle]

 

1 Sakuma, Die Nürnberger Tuchmacher, 50–53, 122.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 137–38.

4 Ibid., 139.

The data given in the table is well reflected in the cloth seal finds in Hungary. There are four types, which can undoubtedly be connected to Nuremberg (Fig. 2).

 

Table 2. Main types of the Nuremberg cloth seals found in the Carpathian Basin

T1	Obverse: Saint Lawrence holding book and gridiron; reverse: Gothic minuscule or Renaissance type NUE/REMBE/RG	5 finds	Eastern Slovakia, Stapar (Serbia: József Géza Kiss’ Collection), vicinity of Szolnok (3 items)
T2	Coat of arms of Nuremberg on both sides of the seal	14 finds	2 from southern Transdanubia (Private collection and Hungarian National Museum [hereafter HNM]); northern Transdanubia (HNM) Unknown (HNM) Bácska-Bánság (József Géza Kiss’ Collection) Csomorkány; Ópusztaszer; Szeged vicinity; Orosháza-Csorvás; Orosháza–Szentetornya; 3 from the vicinity of Szolnok; Paks-Cseresznyés, Pápa
T3	Coat of arms of Nuremberg and Renaissance W with floral ornament	12 finds	Orosháza–Gerendás; Orosháza–Nagyszénás; Kunágota; Bácska-Bánság (József Géza Kiss’ Collection) Unknown (2 items in private collections) Castle of Bács, 3 from the vicinity of Szolnok, Paks-Cseresznyés
T4	Coat of arms of Nuremberg and Renaissance N with floral ornament	7 finds	Unknown (HNM) Battonya–Basarága; Castle of Diósgyőr; Castle of Bajcsa; Castle of Sempte (today Šintava, Slovakia); Orosháza-Szentetornya, Feltót

 

As the two tables make clear, the known cloth seals most of all fit the category either of textiles produced from English wool or English cloth dyed in Nuremberg. The first type of seals unambiguously corresponds to the first group of “English” fabrics from the sixteenth-century regulation, since there is no other version with an image of Saint Lawrence. The only difference is the lack of the imperial eagle and the inscription on the reverse side. The reason for this might be that, according to the type of NUE/REMBE/RG, these seals seem to precede this regulation chronologically. They are datable to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century (Fig. 2a). Unfortunately, all four such seals are stray finds and cannot be dated any more precisely. The one found near Szolnok with the Renaissance […]RE[…]/[…]RK[?] inscription indicates the use of this type until at least the mid-sixteenth century. A very interesting fact about these finds is that there are no known similar cloth seals from other countries.

The second type completely corresponds to the regulation. These seals have identical coats of arms of Nuremberg on both sides (Fig. 2b). Four out of the fourteen such seals are stray finds without even a precise location. Two were found somewhere in southern Transdanubia, another one in northern Transdanubia, while in case of the fourth find there is no data available at all.50 Five more seals from different private and museum collections found in the vicinities of Szeged and Szolnok should also be considered stray finds since there is no data regarding their precise localisations. At the same time, there are several luckier finds from Ópusztaszer, Csomorkány, Paks-Cseresznyés, Orosháza-Csorvás, and Orosháza-Szentetornya on which considerably more information is available. Four of them were found during archaeological field surveys, while the fifth (the one from Ópusztaszer) was discovered during the excavations of an abandoned rural settlement and monastic site.51 The stratigraphy does not help in these cases but the historical events define the ante quem data of the finds. All five villages were more-or-less significant settlements before the Ottoman expansion in the mid-sixteenth century. Surviving the first period of military activity, all of them fell victim to the 1596 Ottoman campaign, the first phase of the Long Turkish War (or Fifteen Years War: 1591–1606).52

The cloth seals with the coat of arms of Nuremberg on one side and a Renaissance W letter on the other cannot be directly connected to any of the versions described in the regulations (Fig. 2c). However, the coat of arms seems identical with that on the second type. All of the twelve such finds were discovered either around Szolnok (three items) or in the southern part of the Great Hungarian Plain: Orosháza-Gerendás; Nagyszénás; Kunágota; Bácska–Bánság (József Géza Kiss’ Collection); unknown (two items in private collections) and the Castle of Bács (today Bač, Serbia). The chronology of this group can be also given according to the ante quem date of the sites: all the settlements around Orosháza (Gerendás, Nagyszénás, Kunágota) were destroyed at the end of the sixteenth century, which means that these seals must have been brought there earlier. The Renaissance details around the letter W and the coat of arms suggest that they date back to the sixteenth century. Since the known regulation does not give any hints concerning the interpretation of the fabrics marked with these seals, in my opinion, it should be identified with textiles not necessarily produced locally. It is very important that in the sixteenth century not only fabrics that were made in Nuremberg were given Nuremberg cloth seals, but also cloths that were imported from different places. Certainly, this product was also checked to be sure it met the required standards, and then it was sealed. After 1566, the local and the foreign cloths were marked differently.53 At the same time, the most plausible explanation for the simultaneous appearance of the coat of arms of Nuremberg and a W on the same seal is that such fabrics were also produced in Wöhrd. In this case, the W refers to the name of the suburb. The fact that the Hungarian accounts and registers drew a distinction between the cloth from Wöhrd and Nuremberg54 proves that this difference was somehow recognisable and that for some reason it was important to separate these fabrics. The easiest way to present the different origin was to mark it on the seals.

The fourth group of the known Nuremberg seals seems the best datable one. This is the type with a coat of arms on the obverse side and a letter N on the reverse side with a clear Renaissance character (Fig. 2d). According to the contemporary regulations, this version appeared in the late 1560s.55 Altogether seven such finds are known so far, and they are all from the Carpathian Basin. Except the already published stray find,56 three were discovered in castles: Bajcsa,57 Diósgyőr,58 and Feltót (today Tauţi, Romania). Two more were found around Orosháza (the deserted villages of Szentetornya and Battonya). The last one, from Sempte, cannot be identified indisputably as a cloth seal from Nuremberg, because apart from the letter N, it bears no other characteristic details of the group.59 As is known from the case of Switzerland, the letter N may also refer to Nördlingen.60 The situation with the dating is in some ways similar to that with the other groups of Nuremberg finds since at least four of the seven sites existed until the last decade of the sixteenth or the first of the seventeenth century.

Summarizing the Nuremberg cloth seal finds from Hungary, two details are very conspicuous. One is that there are no known published analogies from outside the territory of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary, except a single stray find of the third type from Bohemia.61 The other such detail is that the dating of all known Nuremberg cloth seals fits within the sixteenth century, with slight variance towards the late fifteenth and early seventeenth. Both of these observations are hard to explain. Perhaps the lack of foreign analogies is primarily the result of the different states of the research. The reason for the second one might be explained by the relatively late introduction of lead cloth seals in the textile production in Nuremberg. The interruption at the beginning of the seventeenth century must have been the consequence of the collapse of the cloth market in Hungary during and after the Long Turkish War.

Written Sources and Rich Archaeological Evidence (Ulm)

The case of Ulm is somewhat clearer than the previous ones. The connections between Hungary and the city are well documented from the fourteenth century when Ulm became an important importer of Hungarian wool. From as early as the mid-fifteenth century, medium quality Ulm cloth can be traced in the Carpathian Basin. In the Sybenlinder list it appears as VLMER.62 Even if its quality decreased during the Ottoman period, it was still presented in the sixteenth–seventeenth-century custom records.63 Beginning in the late Middle Ages, Ulm was producing mainly two types of textiles: woollen cloth and cotton fabrics. However, there is not yet any contemporary evidence for differences in the sealing practices used with these types of textiles. The written sources from Ulm itself show a gradually developing cloth industry up until the early seventeenth century, when it was interrupted by the Thirty Years’ War and never recovered.

As archaeological finds, there are three types of cloth seals from Ulm in the Carpathian Basin, and all of them include the coat of arms of the city: party per fess Sable and Argent.64

1) obverse: coat of arms of Ulm; reverse: imperial eagle (Fig. 3a)

2) obverse: coat of arms of Ulm; reverse: party per pale, demi-eagle at the pale (Fig. 3b)

3) obverse: coat of arms of Ulm; reverse: inscription ULM written in Humanist capital letters (Fig. 3c)

There is a fourth type known in Germany, on which the coat of arms on the obverse is supplemented with Renaissance letters V-L-M65 or a date (for example 1518), and the imperial eagle of the reverse is replaced with the Gothic minuscule type ULM. However, at the moment no examples of this version of the Ulm seals have been found in East Central Europe.

The largest collection of the Ulm seals in Hungary originates from the excavations of the old market square in the small western Hungarian town of Pápa. These finds represent the first two of the known types of such items. In Pápa the 14 seals were found in very different layers. Apart from three stray finds, two more came from modern features in secondary positions. The stratigraphy of the rest of the eight items can be dated from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. The layers datable by coins indicate significant strata from the mid-sixteenth century. They are connected most of all to the layers associated with the rearranging of the market square when some new houses were built on the formerly paved surface. This process took place between 1526 and the late 1560s.66 According to the numismatic finds from the same layers, the dating can be narrowed to the 1550s or 1560s. Some other Ulm seals were found in a destruction or levelling layers datable not later than to the beginning of the seventeenth century. These layers indicate a huge catastrophe that struck the town around 1600. There were two such events in the history of Pápa in this period, which may have led to the destruction of all the buildings at the market square. The first was the siege of 1597 when the explosion of the gunpowder destroyed the castle and burnt most of the town to the ground.67 The next event, which was less likely to have been the cause, took place in 1600. The unpaid Walloon mercenaries revolted and turned to the Ottoman side. This led to another siege, which might have caused damage to the town as well. In any case, from the first decade of the seventeenth century, the market square of Pápa was again rearranged and new stone houses were constructed on the site of the earlier timber-framed ones.68 This construction activity was preceded by a significant levelling of the debris of the earlier structures. This is the levelling layer that contained the Ulm cloth seals. To conclude these observations, all the datable seals from Pápa come from the second half of the sixteenth century. The similar finds from Germany69 and Great Britain confirm this dating,70 indicating at the same time the earlier appearance of this type of Ulm seals.

Apart from the fourteen items found at Pápa, there are sixteen more cloth seals with the coat of arms of Ulm found in Hungary. All of them are metal-detector finds and thus cannot be dated properly. Eight seals were collected in the vicinities of Szolnok, and five additional seals were found in the plain region of Hungary: Révbérpuszta, Hajdúböszörmény, Nagyszénás, Orosháza-Fecskés, and Orosháza-Szentetornya, one more not far from Bény (today Bíňa, Slovakia). The last one is a stray find from a private collection. The finds from the plain region can be dated to before the end of the sixteenth century, because the deserted villages were destroyed in that time, during the so-called Long Turkish War (or Fifteen Years War: 1591–1606). Most of the stray finds (six seals) belong to the first group (arms and a whole eagle). Five more represent the second group with the demi-eagle. Only two items have the inscription VLM on the reverse, and three more were identified only on the basis of the fragments of the coat of arms. At the present stage of the research, there is not enough data to make any chronological distinction between the three types of seals from Ulm.

Scarce Written and Firm Archaeological Evidence (Augsburg, Dinkelsbühl, Memmingen, Rothenburg, and Waldsee)

The absence of the written sources concerning a particular production center does not necessarily mean the complete absence of its fabrics in the Kingdom of Hungary. This is the case of Augsburg. Cloth production in the city began in the thirteenth century. Its fabrics were very widespread all across the Europe. This fact is well documented not only by the contemporary written sources71 but also by a large number of the cloth seals with the coat of arms and symbols of Augsburg. The most popular product from the Augsburg textile industry was the fustian, which can be dated from the thirteenth century onward, and by the end of the Middle Ages was represented by fabrics of different quality and colours.72 According to Székely, there is no mention of Augsburg in the Hungarian sources. However, he checked primarily the sources on the north-western section of the border of the Hungarian Kingdom referring exclusively to the cloth fabrics (i.e. woollen production). He did not collect references for the linen or cotton textiles, which, however, was also regularly imported to Hungary. Correspondingly, the fustian – which was made of cotton – was omitted from his collection. At the same time, it is perfectly possible that the products from Augsburg were used as duties paid elsewhere, probably crossing the northern or western borders.

Walter Endrei in his study states that the Augsburg fustian was traded in Hungary. Thus, for example, in 1519 the Funck Trade Company sent some rolls of this textile to Kőszeg.73 The presence of the Augsburgian fustian in the Kingdom of Hungary can be confirmed so far on the basis of two cloth seals. One of them is known from the private collection of József Géza Kiss. It was found originally in the south-eastern part of Hungary (Fig. 4a). The other was discovered during a field survey in Kóny (north-west Hungary) (Fig. 4b). Both of them represent a very characteristic type of seal with a Gothic majuscule A referring to the name of the city on the obverse and the pine cone on the reverse. The last one appears in the coat of arms of the city from the Middle Ages.74

This type of cloth seal was in relatively widespread use all across Europe, and it is familiar from at least five countries: England,75 Germany,76 Poland,77 Denmark,78 and the Netherlands.79 Since the seals from Hungary are stray finds, their dating can be done according to similar finds from other sites. The form of the coat of arms and the size of the Hungarian finds are very common for most of the similar European seals. These analogies enable us to date the item from the private collection to the sixteenth century and the one from Kóny to the seventeenth century. However, the style of the cone of the seal from Kóny and the fact that the reverse side of the seal has specific iconography suggest an even later date for this item, sometime around the late seventeenth or even the eighteenth century.

There is a relatively large group of southern German cities known as exporters of linen or fustian fabrics to Hungary in the late Middle Ages. The written sources from the first half of the sixteenth century mention Dinkelsbühl, Memmingen, Rothenburg, and Waldsee.80 These places were relatively well known for their high and medium quality textile production in the late Middle Ages, up to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.81 There is no information concerning the quality of their fabrics sold in Hungary or the quantities that were sold. Nevertheless, the number of the identifiable cloth seals is relatively small. The most widespread type is from Memmingen, which can be identified by its coat of arms blazoned party per pale demi-eagle and cross gules.82 When readable, the reverse side in most of the cases shows a Gothic minuscule M referring to the name of the city. Altogether, six indisputable finds (i.e. finds that bear a recognisable coat of arms) are known from the Carpathian Basin: Pápa (Fig. 4c), Csejte (today Čachtice, Slovakia), Bény, Battonya-Kovácsháza, Szolnok, and one in a private collection (Fig. 4d). There are two more finds, which can be identified as originating in Memmingen on which only the Gothic M survived. Both finds were discovered at the market square of Pápa. Concerning the dating, only the finds from Pápa and Csejte have any stratigraphical data. In the first case, the seals with the letter M came from the layers datable to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The one from Csejte, which was improperly identified by Ján Hunka as a cloth seal from Opole (Silesia, Poland), was accompanied by two coins, the younger of which was a quarting of King Sigismund from 1430–37.83 As they are almost identical with the stray finds, the dating seems to have been the same, roughly the period from the mid-fifteenth until the mid-sixteenth century.

All four cloth seals connected to Dinkelsbühl should be regarded as stray finds, including the two from the vicinity of Szolnok. The find locations of two others are completely unknown: one is in a private collection (Fig. 5a), the other, which is in the Hungarian National Museum (Fig. 5b), has already been published but as of unknown provenance.84 These items can be identified according to the three corns in the ear from the coat of arms of the city.85 The reverse side of the seals depicts an imperial eagle. In one case, only the reverse side survived with the eagle but its characteristic shape enables one to identify the seal firmly. There is no data so far for dating this group of seals more precisely than the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, based mostly on historical references on the settlement structure of the Great Hungarian Plain, where these finds might have been discovered. I have not yet found any published seals from Dinkelsbühl outside the Carpathian Basin.

The last two cities, Rothenburg and Waldsee, have relatively simple and thus not unambiguously identifiable coats of arms. The coat of arms of Rothenburg is Argent a castle with two towers Gules;86 for Waldsee, the coat of arms is even simpler: Sable a fess Argent.87 The identification of the seals was possible due to the inscriptions on them: ROTEN/BVRG and WALDSEE. Two seals from Waldsee were found in the course of the excavations at Pápa, and another one comes from the vicinity of Szolnok (Fig. 5c). The latter is a stray find, but those from Pápa were discovered on the sixteenth–seventeenth-century surface layers of the market. The reverse side of the seals in all cases depicts the coat of arms of the city. There is only one known item firmly identifiable with Rothenburg, also found somewhere around Szolnok, but with no information that would make it possible to identify the location any more precisely (Fig. 5d). The dating can be deduced only from the type of inscription. The antique style of the fonts suggests dating not earlier than the first half of the sixteenth century.

Only Archaeological Evidence (Munich, Regensburg, Hof, Kulmbach, and Kaufbeuren)

The list of the cities the textile products of which were imported to the Kingdom of Hungary (as we know from the written sources) can be extended by five more places. This information comes from the archaeological finds. All five cities, namely, Munich, Regensburg, Hof an der Saale, Kulmbach, and Kaufbeuren, played more or less notable roles in the textile industry of southern Germany, but none of them appears in the known contemporary written documents as an exporter of textiles to Hungary. The most significant center for them was Munich,88 the cloth seal of which found at Castle Szitnya (today Sitno, Slovakia) was first identified by Ján Hunka.89 Since then, one more has been found in the vicinity of Szolnok and at least eight at the market square of Pápa (Fig. 6a–b). The basis for the identification of them is a monk’s head on the obverse, which at the same time refers to the name of the city and to its coat of arms.90 The reverse of the seals varies considerably, presenting at least five different imprints: a stylized image of a church (a triangle or rectangle with a cross on top), a Gothic minuscule letter M or flowers. Only the last type recurs twice. There is no convincing explanation for this phenomenon, but it might indicate that these marks were some kind of privy marks. The Munich seals found in Pápa can be dated predominantly to the sixteenth century, even if two items were discovered in later layers. It seems that no cloth from Munich arrived to Pápa after the occupation of the town by the Ottoman army in 1594 and its destruction during the siege in 1597.91 The seal found at Castle Szitnya has been dated to the fifteenth century.92 The last one from Szolnok is a stray find, but the characteristic late Renaissance style fonts from the fragmented inscription on the reverse ([…]HA) suggest a relatively late dating, maybe even to the seventeenth century.

Outside the territory of medieval Hungary, only two cloth seals that can be connected to Munich are known so far, both of them from the metal detectorists’ web forums. The monk’s head on the obverse is almost identical with that on the Hungarian finds, while the reverse shows privy mark-like symbols.93 Their dating is uncertain, as are their find locations.

The textile production of Regensburg was as important as that of Munich, but only four cloth seals that can be indisputably connected to the city have been found so far (both in and outside of Hungary). The unquestionable identification is possible only when the imprints on the seals included the name of the city, because the relatively widespread crossed keys in its coat of arms may refer, for example, to Leiden, Lubań or Weil der Stadt. The obverse of all four certain finds shows the head of St Cassian (the patron of the oldest parish church of Regensburg), with the circumscribed text RATISPONENSIS (Latin for of Regensburg). In some cases, the reverse side has also survived, presenting the coat of arms, i.e. the crossed keys. Three of the seals from Regensburg are stray finds: one was found in the vicinity of Győr (Fig. 6c), two others are still in a private collection with no indication of their find locations (Fig. 6d). The fourth item was found during rescue excavations carried out at the Buda castle. However, no archaeological dating is available for it either.94 The chronology of these finds is based only on stylistic features, namely the fonts of the inscription, suggesting most convincingly that they were made in the fifteenth century.

There are some more cloth seals with crossed keys but with no other identifying details. According to their quality and comparing them with the reliably identified seals from Leiden and Lubań, they may be connected to Regensburg. Such seals have been found during field surveys in the vicinity of Szécsény and in the deserted village of Orosháza-Pereg.

Hof an der Saale was a less significant textile production center95 but it is nonetheless relatively well represented in Hungary by its cloth seals. The obverse of these seals usually shows the coat of arms of the city: Gules two towers Argent in escutcheon between them Sable with Lion rampant Or.96 The reverse could have been executed in two ways: a large Renaissance H referring to the name of the city, or a ligature HOF. Altogether, five cloth seals can be identified as provenanced from Hof. Four of them have been found in Pápa, predominantly on the sixteenth-century surface of the market (Fig. 7a). The fifth similar item has already been published but only as an unidentified find datable to the seventeenth century97 (Fig. 7b). It was donated to the Hungarian National Museum as part of a larger collection and thus has no data concerning its origin. There are no other known seals from Hof elsewhere.

Another city not mentioned in the Hungarian written sources but represented in Hungary by its cloth seals is Kulmbach. The place was known primarily for its fustian production, which reached its peak in the late Middle Ages.98 The cloth seals, both of which were found at the Market Square of Pápa, can be identified by the inscription CVLM/BACH (Fig. 7c) or by the easily recognisable coat of arms: party per pale with Hohenzollern arms on the left and Azure Lion and Eagle Argent on the right.99 Seals from the Kulmbach-fabrics have been discovered in the layers dated by fifteenth and sixteenth-century coins. Most probably, the cloth was imported to Pápa in the time of the heyday of the city, i.e. in the middle of the sixteenth century.

The last city represented by only two items is Kaufbeuren. This relatively small place was not too significant but it produced reasonably good quality fustian.100 There are two seals that can be connected to Kaufbeuren, in both cases on the base of the coat of arms visible on them: Gules bend Or with two stars Or.101 The one discovered in Pápa has been published. It can be dated to the sixteenth century according to the stratigraphy of the excavation site102 (Fig. 7d). The second cloth seal was recently acquired within a larger collection from the vicinity of Szolnok. Unfortunately, there is no data available concerning the find location of the seal. According to the similar features of the coat of arms, it must be dated correspondingly to the sixteenth century. There is a single known analogy for cloth seals from Kaufbeuren in Switzerland.

Conclusion

An evaluation of the written and archaeological sources together produces a complex image of textile imports from the southern German region to the Kingdom of Hungary in the late Middle Ages and early post-medieval period (more precisely, the fifteenth–sixteenth centuries). The most important result of this analysis is the creation of a long list consisting of nineteen textile production centers, fabrics from which undoubtedly reached Hungary in the period in question. The analysis also illustrates the importance of interdisciplinary approaches, even in questions concerning economic history. The archaeological finds function as contemporary written documents, offering important details concerning geography and chronology and creating a special puzzle missing from the early approaches, which relied entirely on traditional written sources. By evaluating cloth seals, we not only learn the names of other medieval cities, which from now can be connected to Hungary, we also can identify the very last stop of the fabrics of the city-exporters, the very places of consumption, where the rolls of cloth, fustian, or linen were finally sold in retail (Fig. 8).

Summarizing the information gained from the different sources, the chronological framework can be limited to a bit less than two centuries, from the mid-fifteenth century until the first decades of the seventeenth century. The lack of the cloth seals from the seventeenth century still needs explanation. Despite continuing reports in the written sources about the trade in German fabrics, the gradually shrinking market of the Kingdom of Hungary, which was devastated by endless wars with the Ottoman Empire, resulted in a spectacular decrease in the cloth import by the end of the Long Turkish War. The transformation in the composition of the goods consumed must have begun even earlier. According to the archaeological evidence (primarily from Pápa), the decrease in the overall value of the textiles consumed must have begun in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. While there is strong evidence for the presence of higher quality products (from centers like Nuremberg, Memmingen, and Dinkelsbühl) in the first half and middle of the sixteenth century, products which were marked with large, nicely elaborated seals, by the end of the century the size and the quality of the seals declined noticeably. The drop in the import and sale of quality textiles can also be seen in the appearance of a large quantity of relatively cheap fabrics (Hof, Waldsee, Munich, etc.). Trends in the import of cloths from other regions (e.g. the Low Countries, Silesia, Bohemia, and Austria) confirm and reflect this tendency.

This work should be regarded as preliminary, as there are still many unidentified cloth seals that have been found in the Carpathian Basin. From a longer perspective, an interdisciplinary analysis of all available finds will give a more detailed overview of this topic.

 

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Between “Faithful Subjects” and “Pernicious Nation”: Greek Merchants in the Principality of Transylvania in the Seventeenth Century*

Mária Pakucs-Willcocks

Nicolae Iorga Institute of History

 

Towns in Transylvania were among the first in which Balkan Greeks settled in their advance into Central Europe. In this essay, I investigate the evolution of the juridical status of the Greeks within the Transylvanian principality during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to understand how they were integrated into the institutional and juridical framework of Transylvania. A reinterpretation of available privilege charters granted to the Greeks in Transylvania sheds light on the evolution of their official status during the period in question and on the nature of the “companies” the Greeks founded in certain towns of the principality in the seventeenth century. A close reading of the sources reveals tensions between tax-paying Greeks, whom the seventeenth century Transylvanian princes referred to as their “subjects of the Greek nation,” and the non-resident Greek merchants. Furthermore, strong inconsistencies existed between central and local policies towards the Greeks. I analyze these discrepancies between the princely privileges accorded to the Greeks and the status of the Greek merchants in Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt, today Sibiu, Romania) in particular. The city fathers of this town adhered strongly to their privilege of staple right and insisted on imposing it on the Greek merchants, but the princely grants in favor of the Greeks nullified de facto the provisions of the staple right. While they had obtained concessions that allowed them to settle into Transylvania, Greeks nevertheless negotiated their juridical status with the local authorities of Nagyszeben as well.

Keywords: Transylvania, Saxon towns, Greek merchants, Saxon traders, annual fair, staple right, trade, seventeenth century

Introduction

This paper explores the juridical status of Greek merchants in Transylvania during the second half of the sixteenth century and the seventeenth century, a status created through norms (dietal legislation, princely grants, and town statutes) and, as Zsolt Trócsányi argues, practice.1 The emphasis of my analysis is on the policy of the Transylvanian princes toward the Greeks and the tensions and dissensions between the central legislation and local regulations in this respect. The town of Nagyszeben serves as the case study for the purposes of my analysis. The Transylvanian Diet regularly issued decisions concerning the Greeks, but this dietal legislation has been studied by Lidia A. Demény and Zsolt Trócsányi and consequently will not be revisited here at length.2 It is crucial, however, to understand the interplay and the hierarchy between the different laws and statutes, while the Greeks themselves were naturally active factors in creating their juridical status and, in my opinion, used the shifting attitudes and the discrepancies in the rules to their benefit.

A brief introduction into the historical background of the political and economic situation in early modern Transylvania provides a better framework for the argument. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Greek and other Balkan-Levantine merchants, Ottoman subjects, had taken control of the trade with products coming from or via the Ottoman Empire.3 The complex notion of the Greek merchants in early modern Transylvania shall be discussed later. The “Turkish goods,” as they are called in the contemporary sources, were much sought after and made the Balkan merchants indispensable in the supply of products from the east for Transylvania.4 The so-called “Turkish goods” in which the Greeks traded consisted mostly of cotton and silk textiles, cotton and silk threads, carpets, specific carmine and saffian leather products, spices, dried fruits, olive oil, rice, alum, and various dyestuffs. While a detailed analysis of the commercial exchange in seventeenth-century Transylvania is sorely lacking, evidence from the unpublished customs accounts of Nagyszeben shows that the imports of goods from the Ottoman Empire by the Greeks continued along the patterns set in the previous century. The great obstacle with regard to the Greeks was accommodating the need for their skills with the Transylvanian political and juridical system of nations and privileges. We know from Olga Cicanci’s monograph that in 1636 the Greeks founded one “company” in the town of Nagyszeben and one in Brassó (Kronstadt, today Braşov, Romania) in 1678.5 In my analysis of a wider array of documentary evidence, I argue that these “companies” were the result of a longer process of accommodation and integration of the Greeks in Transylvania, and that the nature of these organisations has been largely misconstrued. I use the term “merchant associations” instead.

Transylvania was among the first polities in Central Europe in which Greek and other Hellenised merchants from the Ottoman Balkans settled for business. The reasons for their choice were probably manifold. Beginning in 1541, Transylvania was a vassal state to the Porte, a situation which encouraged entry of the Ottoman subjects into the local market. Furthermore, the towns of Brassó and Nagyszeben in particular had been leading trading centers in the region since the Middle Ages, offering good business opportunities for profitable trade. One should not ignore a declared preference to live in Transylvania for religious reasons as well: in an official statement from 1624, Arbanassi merchants from Chervena Voda, which lies to the south of the Danube River in what today is Bulgaria, who settled in Transylvania declared that living in a Christian country was more precious than their life or merchandise.6

The seminal article of Traian Stoianovich distinguished several categories of Balkan Orthodox merchants who dominated international trade in Southeastern and Central Europe in the eighteenth century. Among them, he listed “the Greek, Vlach and Macedo-Slav muleteer and forwarding agent of Epirus, Thessaly and Macedonia,” and “the Greek and the Bulgarian of the Eastern Rodope.”7 The customs accounts of Nagyszeben and the records of the Greek merchant association show that the merchants who preferred Transylvania as their business destination belonged to this particular group described by Stoianovich: their places of origin were in historical Epirus, in northeastern and northwestern Bulgaria, or in the Pirin Mountains.8 Wallachia and Moldavia, neighboring principalities to the south and east of Transylvania, were significant places of origin for the Greek merchants. A recent study by Lidia Cotovanu on the Greek migration in Wallachia and Moldavia in the late Middle Ages reveals the same regions in the Balkans as the original homelands of the Greeks.9

The Transylvanian Diet proposed and passed articles of law concerning the legal status of the foreign merchants, including the Greeks.10 In seventeenth-century Transylvania, there was more than just one kind of “foreign” merchant. Zsolt Trócsányi has rightfully differentiated between the dietal decisions concerning alien merchants and those dealing strictly with the Greeks.11 Trócsányi identifies the main directions in the legislation on the Greeks, although his assertions regarding the attitude of the princes in this matter are not entirely accurate. For instance, Trócsányi argues that Prince Gabriel Bethlen (1613–29) restricted the activity of the Greeks owing to his “monopolistic foreign trade ideas.”12 As will become evident, Prince Bethlen was in fact supportive of Greek trade in Transylvania.

A discussion of identity among Greeks from the Ottoman Empire is beyond the scope of this paper, especially since I am using exclusively Transylvanian official sources on the matter.13 Nevertheless, it is worth asking: who was a “Greek” in early modern Transylvania? The term was used in various ways: a “Greek” was a Greek-speaking, Eastern-Orthodox merchant, but essentially any merchant coming from the Ottoman Empire and bringing oriental goods was called a Greek.14 Nevertheless, in many situations Greeks were set apart from non-Greek Ottoman subjects, such as Armenians, Jews, and Turks, just as in certain situations Transylvanian Greeks were distinguished from foreign Greeks. Once they became “inhabitants” of the country, i.e. once they agreed to pay taxes, Greeks were treated differently from the merchants who had the same origins but had not settled in Transylvania. The first official mention of this dichotomy between Greeks who owned houses in the principality and those who did not comes from the decision of the Diet in 1591.15 In the eighteenth century, this polarization of the diasporic Greek communities between Ottoman subjects and naturalized Greeks was also evident in Vienna and Naples.16

Furthermore, while we can argue that the notion of a “Greek” was polyvalent, with their growing presence in the country in the seventeenth century, the term was used with more precision, and the Greeks were definitely distinct from the merchants of other nationalities coming from the Ottoman Empire. This is evident, for instance, in a decision of the Transylvanian Diet from 1650: “All Jews and all Greeks should wear cloaks according to their sort, and if anyone of them should wear a Hungarian military cape, he will be fined 200 florins.”17

I present first the juridical status of Greeks in Transylvania created through the agency of princely grants and then discuss the regulations of the town of Nagyszeben as an example of a local policy toward these alien merchants. I conclude with an interpretation of the complex relations between norm and practice in this respect. Owing to the staple right of Brassó, Nagyszeben, and Beszterce (today Bistriţa, Romania), the three major towns on the southern and eastern borders of Transylvania with the neighboring principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, foreign merchants were not allowed to enter Transylvania beyond these points and were obliged to sell wholesale to the local merchants.18 The Saxon towns who enjoyed this privilege argued constantly for their rights to be preserved and observed: throughout the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the grants given in favor of the Greeks were made at the expense of the ancient rights of the Transylvanian Saxons.

While generally the presence of the Greeks in Transylvania was seen as beneficial, there were recurrent fears and concerns about them that came up from time to time in the dietal legislation: one of the concerns was that they were draining the country of good coins and precious metals (e.g. the 1618 decision of the Diet), and another stemmed from the mistrust in the Greeks as spies for the Ottomans (e.g. the 1600 decision of the Diet or art. 1 in tit. LII of the Approbatae Constitutiones).19

Greeks and the Princes of Transylvania

The first decision of the Diet, most probably initiated by Prince Gabriel Báthory (1608–13), to give all alien merchants the freedom to enter Transylvania and sell their goods after having paid the customs duties came in 1609.20 While subsequent legislation retreated on this measure and reinforced the obligation to visit only the staple sites, the breach into the system of the staple towns had been made.

The recent digital publication of the Libri Regii, the protocols of the Transylvanian chancery,21 brought to light unknown princely charters, uncovering crucial facts concerning the settlement of Greeks in the principality. Historical research has hardly taken these “royal books” into account; beginning with Nicolae Iorga, all researchers have relied exclusively on the rich material of the Greek merchant associations in Nagyszeben and Brassó and the decisions of the Transylvanian Diet regarding the Greeks. Furthermore, the presence and activity of Greek merchants in other Transylvanian towns has been entirely neglected by scholarship, some authors only stating that such associations (“companies”) might have existed but that evidence was not available. A linguistic barrier and a national bias were evidently at play here: authors who took a keen interest in the Greek communities in Transylvania did not have access to the Hungarian archival material, while scholars specializing in Transylvanian history with good access to local historical sources have not paid much attention to the presence of the Greeks in trade and the economy in the early modern period.22 Since the inventories of the Greek merchant association in Nagyszeben and Brassó both contained copies of the 1636 privilege of George Rákóczi I (1630–48), scholars considered it the first document issued for the Greeks in Transylvania.23 Authors such as Nicolae Iorga and T. Bodogae state that the protocols of these two Greek “companies” include copies of further confirmations of this charter, which was renewed frequently.24 According to the Libri Regii however, this 1636 document is not the first grant of privileges to Transylvanian Greeks. At the complaint of Greeks of Alba County and of the towns of Kolozsvár (today Cluj Napoca, Romania), Marosvásárhely (today Târgu-Mureş, Romania), and Hunyad (today Hunedoara, Romania) concerning other Greeks, Wallachians, Moldavians, and Turks, Prince Gabriel Bethlen issued a mandate on 22 October 1627.25 The rivalry between tax-paying Greeks and the other Balkan-Levantine merchants, including other Greeks, became a recurrent issue among these trading communities. Bethlen’s privilege in favor of the Transylvanian Greeks reveals that there were established communities of Greeks in several cities in Transylvania (in the princely capital Gyulafehérvár [today Alba Iulia, Romania], Kolozsvár, Marosvásárhely and Hunyad), most notably in ones without the staple right. I would also underline that the text of Bethlen’s grant drew a clear distinction between his “faithful subjects” and other foreign merchants coming from Wallachia, Moldavia, or the Ottoman Empire. This charter throws an entirely different light on the issue of the Greek presence in the principality of Transylvania, as it addresses the resident/non-resident, i.e. tax-paying/non-paying dichotomies in a manner suggesting that the Greeks had been settled in these towns for quite some time. The non-resident merchants were ordered to sell only their own merchandise and not to buy goods from other traders:

We have understood from the humble request of our faithful subjects of the Greek nation who live in the towns of Gyulafehérvár, Kolozsvár, and Marosvásárhely and in the market town of Hunyad that many Wallachians, Moldavians and Greeks, Vlachs, Turks and other people of similar kind of the Turkish Empire who come to do their trade with Turkish merchandise sell their goods with the ell and by the florin […] to the great damage of our inhabitants of the Greek nation living here in Transylvania.26

Prince Bethlen thus called the Greeks “his faithful subjects of the Greek nation,” which suggests a good relationship between the two parties. Greeks did business for the prince, as is clear from a 1619 free pass given by Bethlen’s wife, Zsuzsanna Károlyi, to a number of Greek merchants who were entrusted by the prince to sell 24 hundredweights of mercury. The motivation was that, “according to the law,” the Greeks could not leave the country with gold or silver good coins, and therefore they had to invest their money after the fair in Nagyszeben.27 Indeed, in April 1618, the Diet passed a decision forbidding Greeks to export good currency or objects made of precious metals.28

In the literature dealing with the founding of the Greek merchant association in Nagyszeben, the succession of events appears to be straightforward: in 1636, Prince George Rákóczi I granted them the privilege of setting up their own association under the direction of a “principal” and administering their own justice.29 The Nagyszeben Greek association, according to its internal documents, was founded only in 1638 or 1639, when its members held the first meeting and elected their proestos.30 The document published by T. Bodogae was hailed by this author and others as the founding privilege of the Nagyszeben Greek trading “company.”31 A cliché was born out of this simplification: recent literature, including works I have written, took it over from Cicanci’s book without criticism.32

When reading the text of the 1636 charter, two things become obvious which should have raised questions: there is no mention of Nagyszeben or of any other place in Transylvania whatsoever, and the charter does not contain the word “company.” Principally, the grant sets the limits for the Greeks’ trade and allows them their own administration of justice.33 Nicolae Iorga had indicated as early as 1906 that the 1636 charter was a grant issued to all Greeks living in Transylvania, but his opinion did not become part of the mainstream scholarship. Iorga also asserted that the Nagyszeben “company” was “one of the most significant branches of the great Transylvanian Greek company,”34 and even though this assertion would be a logical conclusion of the foundational charter, other evidence suggests that such a guild or association encompassing all Greek merchants in Transylvania did not exist. Although “company” is not a term used in Rákóczi’s grant, it was used by the Greek merchants: kompania.

Despina Tsourka-Papastathi argued against Cicanci’s interpretation of historical facts immediately after the publication of her book.35 Tsourka-Papastathi offered a more elaborate argumentation of the accurate reading of this 1636 charter in her own book on the Nagyszeben “company,” and she published a critical edition of the document as well.36 She expressed her doubts about this charter being the foundational privilege of the Nagyszeben “company”.37

Let us analyze briefly the contents of the 1636 privilege charter. The preamble mentions beyond any doubt that this grant was offered to all Greek merchants in Transylvania: ex humillima totius communitatis universorum Graecorum in ditione nostra, quaesturam exercentium, supplicatione.38 This phrase strengthens my arguments concerning the Transylvanian Greeks: they had been paying taxes to the treasury, a fact which entitled them to approach the prince with their grievances. The terms of Rákóczi’s grant were very clear: first, the Greeks could elect a suitable man to be their head (idoneum virum in principalem eorum inspectorem eligere possint et valeant), who would arbitrate disputes between Transylvanian Greeks and foreign Greeks. Any litigation with a nobleman or an inhabitant of the country was to be brought to the attention of the local courts, who had the power to arrest any accused Greek. Secondly, the Greek merchants could sell freely at the fairs, under strict conditions. However, they could only offer their stock wholesale (i.e. sell by the bale and not the ell, and not under the value of 100 denars), and for only three days before and after the fair. These restrictions on free sale in fact were intended to favor local traders and merchants, who thus had the benefit of retail sale and could obtain profit margins on the goods bought from the Greeks wholesale.

While Greeks in other Transylvanian towns had established themselves and had been acknowledged by the central authorities as shown by the 1627 charter of Gabriel Bethlen, Nagyszeben had placed many obstacles to stop the Greeks at the gates, obstacles matched only by the opportunities for good business in the town. In my opinion, the non-specific charter granted by Prince George Rákóczi I in 1636 created the first opening for the Greeks to enter the most coveted town in Transylvania. In a memoir from 1747 addressed to Empress Maria Theresia, the Greek merchants from Nagyszeben claimed to have lost in a fire the founding charter for their association. Despina Tsourka-Papastathi believes this assertion, and she suggests that a separate grant for the Greek merchant association in Nagyszeben must have been issued in 1637 or 1638.39 Cicanci mentioned that an undated memoir of the Nagyszeben Greek merchant association addressed to the Transylvanian governor alludes to privileges obtained by the Greeks in 1623, 1630 and 1632, and 1656.40 Iorga also knew of another privilege charter of 1641, preserved in transcripts in the protocols of the Nagyszeben “company,”41 although other authors who studied this archive do not mention it. I personally do not think that a different founding privilege existed at all: the Transylvanian prince could not have overlooked the fact that Nagyszeben possessed the staple right. Greeks entered Nagyszeben by bending the law slightly. According to the protocols of the Nagyszeben Greek association from 1655,42 the scribe could not recover the privileges of the “old Greek merchants” because they were lost due to bad archiving.43 If there are so many confirmations and copies of the 1636 privilege, surely the one that allegedly was lost could have been replaced over time. Furthermore, the 1636 charter was preserved in copies in the archives of the Brassó Greek merchant association as well.44

The founding privilege of the Brassó Greek association from 1678 acknowledges the Nagyszeben “company” (compania) as a model. First, a decision of a Diet was confirmed by Michael Apafi (1661–90), setting the annual tax payable by the Brassó Greeks,45 separately from other Greek communities in Transylvania.46 Subsequently, the Prince issued the charter ad normam companiae Graecorum nostrorum Cibinii commorantium, according to which the Brassó Greeks were allowed their own administration of justice.47 The choice of the Greeks to organize themselves in localized trading associations or guilds instead of a community encompassing all Greeks in Transylvania has to be explained through the social and cultural experiences and expectations of these newcomers into Transylvania. Their solidarities relied more strongly on local connections: extended family and neighbors from their villages or towns of origin. Nevertheless, Greeks paid their taxes jointly at first and also had common duties. I shall return here to the idea, put forward by Iorga, that a pan-Transylvanian Greek association was divided into local branches, the Nagyszeben one being one of the most prominent ones.48 While the historical evidence does not support this hypothesis, it is clear that in the eyes of the Transylvanian political and fiscal authorities the Greeks were one entity, one “nation.”

As a final amendment to another misconception regarding the Greek “trading companies,” I would stress that they did not copy the English Levant Company49 or any other Western European trading company.50 The Greek “companies” in Transylvania were not joint-stock business ventures. Before arriving to the wrong conclusion, Olga Cicanci was rightly looking in the Balkans for the possible models for the Nagyszeben and Brassó associations of the Greek merchants. The Transylvanian Greek “companies” were associations of individuals engaged in trade, but each merchant was responsible for his own ventures. When in 1694 the head and other members of the Nagyszeben merchant association appeared in front of the town judges to testify for a fellow “companion,” they strongly refused to settle any unpaid debts. They stated: Nemo enim pro alio solvere tenetur.51 The aim of their association was more a juridical and political one, aimed at protecting their individual commercial interests. Thus, it was very similar to a merchant guild.

The following princely charter dealing with the Greeks was issued on May 14, 1643 by the same George Rákóczi I. This is a mandate instructing clerks and officials to allow foreign Greeks, Armenians and Serbs to trade freely in Transylvania, because these merchants had agreed to pay an annual tax of 2000 florins.52 The document names the individual Greeks entrusted with collecting the tax from all concerned, including Greeks from Hunyad, Hátszeg (today Haţeg, Romania), and Marosvásárhely. Lidia Demény asserted that a similar mandate was given by George Rákóczi I two years earlier.53

Five years later, on April 9, 1648, at the request of the Greeks in Gyulafehérvár, Prince George Rákóczi I ordered that the Jews share the burdens of the services assigned to the Greeks: either transporting mercury or managing the post-house and post-horses. In this mandate, significant details about the legal framework for the trade of the Greeks emerge:

The Greeks living in our suburb of Gyulafehérvár inform us jointly that […] the Jews had taken away business from them, because whenever a Turk comes with goods, the Jews go even as far as Deva to meet him and buy up his stock, selling it onward for double the price, although they are not allowed to do so.54

Jews had been allowed to settle in Transylvania in 1623, when Gabriel Bethlen had stipulated in his privilege that one of their tasks was to bring merchandise from Istanbul.55 Rivalry quickly ensued with the Greeks, who were competing for the princely favors and for the distribution of the same goods.

On February 1, 1653, Prince George Rákóczi II (1648–60) issued a mandate at the request of tax-paying Greeks according to which all Greek, Armenian, and other foreign merchants (except for the Jews) who traded in Transylvania pay their due taxes. The competition between tax-paying Greeks and the other Balkan-Levantine merchants, including the non-resident Greeks, was a recurrent theme throughout the seventeenth century. This document reveals how the Greeks themselves explained their predicament to the Transylvanian prince:

Tax-paying Greeks doing commerce in our realm of Transylvania have reported that often Greeks who do not belong to any society [társaságokon kivül levö görögök], Armenians, and other nations come to this country to do trade, but refuse to pay the rightful contribution [paid by the Greeks]. Many of them resort to local judges and public officers for protection, paying them bribes. Furthermore they [Greeks outside the associations] don’t allow others to pay taxes either, those who get married and settle in towns and villages, claiming that they are now inhabitants of the country, even though they continue to do trade. 56

A mandate of Prince Michael Apafi from October 21, 1678 settled the annual contribution that the Greek merchant association from Nagyszeben had to pay, separately from the other Greeks, and gave the Nagyszeben Greeks an order to change to good money the contribution paid by the Szeklers for the tribute to the Porte. This annuentia thus sheds light on a new duty entrusted to the Greeks, that of money-changing: “the tax of 10 000 florins that [the Szeklers] owe on St. George’s day, the said Greeks should take into their hand to change into good money, as is the custom to change it to good imperial thalers.”57

Nagyszeben and the Greek Merchants: Town Statutes and the Staple Right in the Seventeenth Century

The town magistrate and council of Nagyszeben issued their own statutes and regulations aimed at organizing the political, social, and economic life of the town. The Greek merchants had become an issue for the local authorities by the sixteenth century, and this issue was addressed accordingly by the town officials. The growing pressure from the southern merchants to be allowed to trade freely was more important for the town of Nagyszeben than it was for the Transylvanian Diet. The struggle58 was to preserve the privilege of the staple right, granted to the town of Nagyszeben in the fourteenth century. In a nutshell, the original privilege allowing the exclusive distribution of cloth on the local market for the Nagyszeben merchants against the merchants from Upper Hungary (Kassa [Kaschau, today Košice, Slovakia]) had come to offer local Saxon traders a lucrative position to buy up and sell the products coming from the Ottoman Empire. Well into the sixteenth century, according to the staple right, merchants coming from Wallachia had to deposit their goods at Talmács (Talmesch, today Tălmaciu, Romania) and later Sellenberk (today Şelimbăr, Romania) and offer their stock wholesale to local merchants.59

However, there was undeniable pressure from these foreign merchants to sell unhindered on the Transylvanian market. Otto Fritz Jickeli mentioned that in 1577 a Greek merchant obtained the first princely privilege to sell salted fish, blankets, and sheep.60 The Saxon towns succeeded in having the Diet on their side throughout the sixteenth century, but the overall attitude and consequently the legislation gradually shifted in favor of the Greek merchants. The last weapon the Saxons could resort to was their own town statutes. Sixteenth-century documentary evidence, albeit scant, indicates that the Greeks had not entered the town and that they carried out their business at the staple place.61

The first town statute of the seventeenth century was issued in 1614. Nagyszeben was recovering politically and economically from the devastation caused by the former prince of Transylvania, Gabriel Báthory, who had occupied, plundered, and emptied the city of its inhabitants. The new prince, Gabriel Bethlen, was trying to pacify the Saxons, and he negotiated with them new terms of mutual collaboration. Gabriel Báthory had deviously occupied Nagyszeben, after asking to spend the winter in the city; now the Saxons were asking for safeguards and guarantees that Bethlen’s winter sojourn in Nagyszeben would not end in occupation and distress. The new prince tried to make amends, reaching an agreement with the community of Transylvanian Saxons62 and, particularly, with the authorities of Nagyszeben.

Among the conditions requested by the Saxon universitas, which negotiated the terms on Nagyszeben’s behalf, one concerned foreign merchants:

16. The Greeks and other traders, coming with their goods from Moldavia, Wallachia, and other places, should be obliged to go first to the staple places, to the twentieth, and to the customs stations without any delays; they should sell their wares there, and not go to fairs, under the penalty of confiscation of their goods, because this causes great damage to the Transylvanian merchants and to the country. This is evident also from the fact that the good money, ducats and gold, is paid for them, and they [the foreign merchants – MPW] take the good money into foreign countries, causing a shortage of money in Transylvania.63

Despite the prince’s reassurances, the position of the Saxons within the Transylvanian Diet had waned significantly, and they rarely prevailed. Prince Bethlen’s own stance was in favor of an abundance of goods from the Ottoman lands, and as we have seen, he had forged good relations with the Greeks.

In 1631, the city fathers of Nagyszeben issued their statuta specialia, the first article of which tackled the issue of Greek merchants and their disregard for existing laws:

We shall discuss first the harmful nation of the Greeks (die schädliche nation der Griechen), who have become prevalent not only in Siebenbürgen [i.e. Saxon Seats – MPW], but travel unhindered through the entire country [i.e. the principality of Transylvania – MPW], causing great damage to the country; also they have taken such liberties (Licencz) within our towns, staying here all year round and selling their goods as they wish, causing damage and disadvantage to our city folk and merchants, by taking the food from their mouths, not taking into account the fact that the locals are the ones who carry the burdens of the city.64

The privilege of the staple right (Staffel) was at the core of this statute: the Nagyszeben merchants had become accustomed to having the Ottoman products brought to their doorstep, giving them the upper hand in relation to foreign merchants, especially the Balkan-Levantines.65 Such an attitude cost them in the long-run: the Greeks had access to the oriental goods, information, and support networks.66

The 1631 town statute argued that Greeks were the only ones who disregarded the ancient privilege obtained by the Nagyszeben citizens for their faithful services to the Hungarian monarchs. The city council and the community therefore decided that the Greeks and other nations coming with goods and products through the Turnu Roşu pass should go to the staple place or Niederlag, and after they have paid the twentieth dutifully, they should not repack [the goods – MPW] but sell them in open shops to the inhabitants and artisans, who should be able to get whatever they need for their work. [The Greeks] should not sell to other foreigners, and should only sell by the pound, the centner, and the dozen, and for gold florins. After the fourteen days set by the law run out, local traders are allowed to sell their goods to the Greeks, but the Greeks should not take [these purchases] to the houses or to the inn, under the penalty of losing their goods. Furthermore, the Greeks should not take their goods back home, and if they try to cheat and sell them in secret, their goods should be confiscated when the truth is uncovered.67

The city fathers of Nagyszeben organized their concerns according to the interests of the guilds and townsfolk, giving them, at least in theory, the first choice in buying the goods they wanted or needed. The 1631 Nagyszeben town statute also stipulated that “Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Jews and other nations” who pay the customs duties were allowed to enter the country during the times of the annual fairs.68 It was, however, an article that had little effect on the actual situation of the Greeks and foreign merchants in Transylvania. This statute echoes the 1597 “articles,” which aimed to create the rules to establish equal access for all townsfolk to merchandise and services, of which first on the list were the “goods brought by the Greeks.”69

The fact that the Greeks established their own trading guild in Nagyszeben after George Rákóczi I’s 1636 privilege was not acknowledged in any official document issued by the local Saxon authorities. The general conflux of the Saxon universitas on 19–24 January 1654 had decided that “foreign merchants, Greeks, Armenians and Jews, cannot trade with goods that grow or are made in this country,” and it listed things such as pigs, lambskins, wool, or wax.70

In 1656, the city council of Nagyszeben issued a decision intended to control the Greeks who had settled in the town by imposing harsh rules and limits on their trading. This regulation built on the privilege granted by George Rákóczi I twenty years earlier: unless the Greeks were willing to pay 50 florins a year to rent the town shops, they could only sell freely within the time span of 14 days before and after the annual fairs. Furthermore, a curfew was set for the Greeks at eight o’clock in the evening, they could only buy wholesale from the market and not to the detriment of locals, and they could not practice their religion or open schools.71 Although this statute does not mention the staple right, it became the reference point for the very harsh negotiations with the Viennese authorities for the statute of Greek merchants during the eighteenth century. Thus, a later memoir (1726) of the Saxons addressed to the Viennese court confirms the fact that the 1656 statute had been accepted and agreed to by the Greeks. Nagyszeben officials declared that they only made these concessions to the Greeks because a plague in 1654 had taken a hard toll on the Nagyszeben merchants, thus compelling them to take advantage of the presence of the Greeks temporarily.72

The town statute from 1698 addressed the question of foreign and local merchants by declaring that the locals had always had an advantage over foreigners, “a privilege which should not be overlooked or forgotten,” and arguing that even though the “Greeks and other foreigners are tolerated temporarily (ad tempus), they should be given precedence over the locals after having supplied the town with goods.”73

I have argued that, although there was no formal abolition of the staple right, this medieval privilege became obsolete and surpassed by legislation and historical context. In the aforementioned memoir of 1726 addressed to Vienna, the Saxons stated that the Greeks had never been granted the right to sell freely in Nagyszeben and that this was a harmful abuse of the law.74 However, the Saxons had created a norm from the practice of the staple right, shifting the original provisions of the medieval privilege to suit their own needs and the changing economic realities.75

The Greeks in Transylvania between Freedom of Trade and Limitations

After discussing the documentary evidence, I offer a summary of the findings, focusing on the gains obtained by the Greeks in the principality of Transylvania and the strict legal and institutional framework that was created for them.

In the seventeenth century, Greeks made great advances in securing their leading position in the distribution of goods from the Ottoman Empire in Transylvania. However, they were far from being on equal footing with the local merchants. They were given specific duties to carry out for the common good of the principality, which were mentioned in this article. Their prowess and acumen for business were undeniably acknowledged by the Transylvanians: in 1671 the Greek judge was given the task of appointing people to investigate the exchange rates of foreign currencies.76 Greeks were allowed to pursue their trade under strict conditions, which are underlined in a mandate of Prince Michael Apafi from 1675 sent to the royal judge of Nagyszeben:

We have read your letter and understood, about the goods of that Italian, that the Greeks living there [in Nagyszeben – MPW] have bought up his goods perfidiously, acting very badly and wickedly, whereas they had no permission (annuentia), neither from ourselves, nor from the country [the Diet – MPW] to buy such goods for profit to the detriment of our citizens, goods that other foreign merchants bring into our country to sell. On the contrary, we know that it is forbidden for them to interfere.77

The text of the princely instruction highlights one crucial limitation imposed on foreign merchants, and particularly on the Greeks, who wanted to do trade in Transylvania: they were only permitted to sell the goods they carried themselves. This rule had two major implications. First, the prohibition against foreign merchants selling the goods of other non-locals stems from the 1627 privilege given by Gabriel Bethlen to the Greeks in various towns in Transylvania, and one comes across it in subsequent official documents. In 1648, the Greeks themselves complained about Jews who purchased oriental products in Transylvania for resale, while an article of the Diet from 1654 clearly stated that “Jews and other foreign merchants […] should bring the goods from abroad themselves.”78 Furthermore, in 1675 it was decided that Greeks, Armenians, and Turks could only buy from local merchants.79 Some of these concerns and stipulations were mirrored by regulations of the Nagyszeben Greek merchant association as well: in 1687, the members of the associations were not allowed to pass on their merchandise to another merchant to sell. Moreover, a regulation from 1690 limited the number of fairs members of the Nagyszeben merchant association were allowed to visit to two per year.80 Secondly, Greeks and Jews, as we have also seen, were confined to selling only goods imported by them from the Ottoman Empire. The Diet had decreed this in 1591,81 and Bethlen’s 1627 privilege defined Greeks by their dealing in “Turkish goods.”

Fundamentally, while their situation improved in the seventeenth century, the Greeks and other foreign merchants from the Ottoman Empire retained their status of aliens and outsiders. Even when they decided to declare themselves inhabitants for tax purposes and own property in Translyvania, their juridical standing was inferior to that of the local merchants. These interdictions and limitations to business were meant to preserve the advantages of the local merchants for distribution and retail sale. In this intricate and definitely not linear construction of their juridical status, the Greeks resorted to individual strategies to improve their chances for integration. These strategies included marriages to local women (e.g. in 1646 a certain György Policzani asking for permission from the prince for his betrothal to a Saxon woman),82 the purchase of property, ennoblement,83 and entering the service of the Prince (certain Greeks farmed out the customs and the salt mines). János Pater, a Greek active in the second half of the seventeenth century, was the most representative example in this respect.84 Similar strategies of integration have been identified in Wallachia and Moldavia, though the scale of the Greek presence was incomparably larger there than in Transylvania.85

The inconsistent legislation and the ambiguity of attitudes toward the Greeks, centrally and locally as well, are characteristic of this century. For instance, the Diet of November 1675 retreated on its previous policy to encourage the Greeks and other foreign merchants, deciding that they should not be allowed to travel or wander freely through the country or use the back roads, where they could be a danger to the country: “and they are allowed free entrance until Brassó, Nagyszeben, Szászváros (today Orăştie, Romania) and Bánffyhunyad (today Huedin, Romania) towards Kolozsvár, but they are forbidden to go anywhere else.” The article of the law points to corrupt customs officers who allowed these merchants to travel further into the country, but also to fellow traders who acted as guides for the newcomers.86 It is clear that these were two of the most common ways of entering Transylvania clandestinely. In Nagyszeben, there was also pressure from the community to have a constant supply of the “goods brought by the Greeks”: requests for the better regulation of trade in oriental goods were presented to the city council.87 Furthermore, in the 1640s, the wife of the royal judge in Nagyszeben, Colomann Gotzmeister, during a bitter divorce trial, was accused of having connections to the recently established Greek merchant association in Nagyszeben.88

Final Remarks and Suggestions for Further Research

How many Greeks were there at any given moment in seventeenth-century Transylvania? The number of members in the trading associations can be an indicator of rough figures: Olga Cicanci has identified 32 members in the Greek merchant association of Nagyszeben in 1695, while in other years for which she could find data the numbers are even lower, usually less than 30.89 In 1670, the Diet had ordered the Nagyszeben Greek merchant association not to have more than 60 members at any given time.90

The Brassó association of the Greek merchants seems to have been larger than the Nagyszeben one, but along with these figures we also need to take into account the unknown figures for the Greeks settled in other places. As mentioned before, Transylvanian authorities also unsuccessfully tried to count the Greeks in the 1670s,91 but the Habsburg administration of Transylvania managed to organize a census of the registered Greeks in Transylvania at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The number of merchants was a little over 200,92 a number consistent with the estimate for the seventeenth century.

A significant feature of the Greeks in Transylvania in the seventeenth century was that they were still quite mobile:93 visiting homes and families, undertaking business trips, or fleeing uncomfortable situations in Transylvania were strong reasons for the underlying mobility of Greeks and other Balkan merchants.

The frictions between the settled and non-settled Greeks in Transylvania reveal how dynamic their diaspora was and how the communities were constantly replenished with new members. Late-seventeenth-century data from the account books of Siguli Stratu show how a Greek trading house operated: based in Nagyszeben, the merchant had family members acting as his agents at fairs and in other trading centers, buying and selling, borrowing and settling debts, and exchanging money. 94

The work of Márta Búr has shown the situation of the Greeks in Hungary, where the first official Greek merchant associations were founded in Tokaj, Gyöngyös, Miskolc, and other towns in the second half of the seventeenth century. Greeks were faced with hostility in these towns as well, while authorities attempted, to no avail, to restrain the scope of their economic activity. As was the case in Transylvania, local authorities had assigned Hungarian Greeks the role of providers of Ottoman products, but Búr noticed that the Greeks chose to settle in market towns, where they could have good access to natural products and livestock. Greeks buying and selling grains, cattle, and sheep organized themselves in traders’ associations similar to the Transylvanian ones in order to protect themselves and their businesses, whereas Greeks dealing in Turkish goods remained individual traders with no guild-like bonds between them. Greeks in Hungary, at least in the early stages of their settlement, also constantly returned to their hometowns in the Balkans.95

Vassiliki Seirinidou has argued that there were two types of Greek diaspora in Central Europe, an early one in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, carrying out retail trade in Turkish products but also keeping shops and monopolizing retail distribution of local goods in towns and villages, and a second diaspora, which formed around the middle of the eighteenth century and engaged in wholesale trade between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires. She argues that while the second diaspora was born out of the first one, it had a different status, outlined in the peace treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and Passarowitz (1718).96 I agree with Seirinidou that the status of the Greek merchants changed drastically after the Ottomans lost their authority over Hungary and Transylvania, but I cannot second her opinion that the second diaspora was formed by new merchants, who had to have the capital to engage in wholesale trade. As I have tried to show here, the Greek and other merchants, subjects of the Ottoman sultans, were very diverse in their origin, financial capability, interests, and status. If we are going to arrive at a subtle understanding of how the Greek diaspora in early modern Central Europe came into being, we must take into account a variety of factors. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the migration of the Greek merchants was still marked by a constant return to their homeland: the absence of the close family and the reliance on the extended male kinship for business is, in my opinion, a better indicator of the status of the Greeks. While some of them acquired either membership in an association (“company”) or paid their share of the common tax, until the eighteenth century, when the extended privileges were granted by Vienna, they could be considered as “migratory labor”97 force. They had a highly-specialized profession, which was based on decades of shared experience, knowledge about the target markets, capital, and so on. In Transylvania, the Greeks, Jews, and Armenians were assigned specific tasks: their role was to provide goods from the Ottoman Empire.

Further research on the still underexplored archives of the Greek merchant associations in Nagyszeben and Brassó should offer more insights into the world of these Balkan merchants. Also, the close study of private letters, business correspondence, bills of exchange, and letters of credit which are found in the local archives will further a better understanding of their business activities and their increased share in Transylvania’s foreign trade beginning with the last decades of the seventeenth century.98

 

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* Archival research for this article was made possible with the support of the European Research Council grant, Luxury, Fashion, and Social Status in Early Modern South-Eastern Europe, ERC-2014-CoG no. 646489–LuxFaSS, hosted by the New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania.

Production of and Trade in Food Between the Kingdom of Hungary and Europe in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries): The Roles of Markets in Crises and Famines*

Andrea Fara

Tuscia University of Viterbo

 

Over the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period, Western Europe was stricken by cyclical crises of subsistence or famines, related to several economic and social factors, such as the trend of production and the increasing price of wheat, the inadequate functioning of the market, the inappropriate intervention policies at the time of particular difficulties, and so on. In the Kingdom of Hungary crises and famines were caused by the same forces. But, surprisingly, cyclical large crises of subsistence and vast course famines had been nearly unknown in the kingdom between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this context, it is argued that the models of Ernest Labrousse and Amartya Sen may explain the emergence and development of crisis and famine not only and simply by the occurrence of exogenous forces such as a fall in crops, environmental shocks, war events and so on, but also and above all through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning and its degree of integration with other markets. The paper thus highlights the particular Hungarian alimentary regime as characterized by a non-contradiction, but rather a thorough-penetration, relationship between agricultural and sylvan-pastoral activities. This not-contradiction was reflected by an alimentary equilibrium that characterized the kingdom throughout the period. In comparison with other parts of Europe, in Hungary alimentary alternatives such as grain, meat and fish remained accessible to most of the population, so the inhabitants’ normal diet remained diversified and not entirely based on cereals. The specific production and exchange structures of the kingdom permitted the maintenance of this alimentary equilibrium that prevented the rise of vast alimentary crises, unless a shock such as war, climatic difficulties and so on occurred. Another reason for the absence of vast course famines was the kingdom’s place in the exchange structures of Europe. The paper argues that, while wars—first of all against the Ottoman Empire—caused great damages and problems in food supplying, the complex economic interaction between crisis, famine and war that characterized the Hungary between over late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period is evidence of the kingdom’s increasing and notable maturation as a market in the European context.

Keywords: food, production, commerce, market, nutrition, crisis, Hungary, Europe.

 

In the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era, Western Europe was stricken by cyclical famines. In this part of the continent, the crises of subsistence and famines alternated in cyclical waves, both short cycles (at least once a year, in periods preceding the harvest, essentially in relation to an expected increase in the price of wheat) and long cycles (approximately every 7–10 years, in relation to several complicated economic and social factors, such as the trends in production and the increasing price of wheat, the inadequate functioning of the market, inappropriate interventionist policies in a moment of particular difficulty, and so on).1 As remarked by Fernand Braudel, “famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into man’s biological regime and built into his daily life. Dearth and penury were continual, and familiar even in Europe, despite its privileged position.”2

In the Kingdom of Hungary famines were clearly caused by the same forces that caused them in Western Europe, such as a drop in the harvest, environmental shocks, wars, and so on. And, of course, when a famine occurred, it afflicted Hungary no less severely that it did other European regions. But, surprisingly, regular and cyclical large subsistence crises and long famines were nearly unheard of in the Kingdom of Hungary between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Similarly interesting, a growing number of food crises and famines was recorded with the passing of time, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, with the largest number of events in the last one. Why did this happen? Does the admittedly fragmentary documentation provide an incomplete or distorted picture of the food regime of the Hungarian population? Or can the virtual absence of mention of famine and subsistence crises in the sources be interpreted as a sign of the existence of what might be termed a specific “nourishing order”? Can the political and institutional context and the production, distribution, and exchange structures of the Kingdom of Hungary explain the absence or limited impact of famine in these territories between late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era? And can this particular phenomenon be explained by applying to the world of medieval and Early Modern Hungary the models elaborated by Ernest Labrousse and Amartya K. Sen to clarify the appearance and evolution mechanisms of crisis and famine in a preindustrial and industrial context, respectively (with a non-Malthusian approach) through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning, and its degree of integration with other markets?3

Labrousse has defined the imbalance between production and demand of alimentary goods, and in particular the supply and demand of wheat (which was almost the sole basis of nourishment in the preindustrial societies of Western Europe), as a crise de type ancien. In the absence of intervention by the central or local authorities to address the consequences of a bad harvest or misguided speculation, this imbalance caused a famine, which should not be understood as a shortage of wheat, but rather as an increase in wheat prices. This increase could give rise to a large-scale crisis, and not only with regard to nourishment. In fact, in cases in which wages were non-elastic, i.e. they were not adjusted in any way to compensate for increases in the prices of agricultural goods, the necessary purchase of these goods (primarily of wheat) for daily nourishment meant a drop in available resources to purchase other agricultural and manufactured articles. It brought about a fall in consumption, prices, and the production of some articles. As mentioned, the central or local authorities could eliminate or limit the most negative effects of this imbalance through specific interventions: they could import alimentary goods or regulate prices. However, such measures did not always yield positive results, as they could inhibit the farmers’ will to invest, since the husbandmen expected to earn higher profits thanks to crisis and famine, or rather thanks to increases in the price of wheat. In conclusion, sometimes such steps were followed by a phase of economic stagnation and crisis.4

Amartya K. Sen has explained the rise and diffusion of alimentary crises, including the phases when crises evolve into famines of vast proportions, through the concept of the entitlement approach, meaning the possession (or not) of some suitable entitlement (title). Hunger does not become a problem because of a shortage of alimentary goods (on the contrary, in most cases, goods are available in sufficient if not abundant quantities on domestic or international markets), but because an individual has no useful title with which to acquire alimentary goods or participate on the marketplace. By entitlement, Sen means above all an income (in general, the whole of suitable rights) that guarantees the satisfaction of individual needs, among which the primary need is for nourishment. In order to understand hunger and famine it is therefore necessary to put the accent on market dynamics and dysfunctions: when there is no possibility to join or participate on the marketplace or some market actors are engaged in speculation (even if not on a large scale) and intervention by central or local authorities is lacking, these anomalies can cause the emergence of sudden and unexpected alimentary crises.5

In this sense, the models of Ernest Labrousse and Amartya K. Sen can explain the emergence and development of crisis and famine not simply as a consequence of the concurrence of external forces, such as a bad harvest, environmental shocks, wars, and so on, but also and above all, through a deeper analysis of the market, its functioning, and its degree of integration with other markets more or less distant. It thus exceeds the Malthusian and neo-Malthusian approaches, which attribute the onset of crisis and famine to the imbalance between the growth of food supply (expected to be arithmetical) and the growth of population (expected to be exponential).

So, in order to understand how and when crisis and famine began to appear in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era and to see whether it is possible to apply the models elaborated by Labrousse and Sen, it is necessary briefly to describe: a) the available sources; b) the market, i.e. the structures of production, distribution, and exchange in these territories, in particular with reference to food.

Sources

The first and greatest difficulty for anyone seeking to study the economic history of Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages is caused by the scarcity of the available sources, a consequence of both the more limited use of the written word than in Western Europe and the extensive damages suffered by the archives of the region over the centuries. The Kingdom of Hungary is no exception, and because of this dearth of sources, the economic and demographic conditions of the vast domains that were subject to the crown of Saint Stephen in the Middle Ages in many ways remain obscure.6

There are no comprehensive records regarding the collection of taxes or the number of settlements. The only source of this kind is the records of the collection of taxes prepared by papal collectors active in the Hungarian lands from the end of the thirteenth century to the second half of the fourteenth century, and these records are fragmentary at best.7

It was probably during the reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437) that records began to be compiled for large estates, with inventories of settled tenants and villages, for military and fiscal purposes. But not many of these documents have survived, and they are mostly incomplete until 1531. The most important and extensively used among them are the lucrum camerae registers of five northeastern counties (Abaúj, Gömör, Sáros, Torna, and Ung) from 1427;8 the register of lucrum camerae of the Tramontane district of Nyitra County from 1452;9 the tax list of Nógrád County from in 1457;10 and the register of royal revenues prepared by Sigismund Ernuszt, bishop of Pécs and royal treasurer, for the fiscal year 1494/95, which is also incomplete, but which contains important information, such as the number of estates and tenants in each comitatus of the kingdom.11 Similar documents for noble estates are exceptional before the end of the fifteenth century, and even then, they remain a rarity and are generally incomplete. A notable exception is the record prepared by Ippolito d’Este, bishop of Eger, then archbishop of Esztergom and Primate of Hungary (†1520).12 However, more detailed administrative documents survive from the sixteenth century, and they offer, at least indirectly, valuable data concerning demographics and population.13

For the urban settlements, beginning with the reign of Louis I (1342–82), lists of accounts and taxes paid by the towns begin to survive in increasing numbers.14 Some records of tax estimation have survived from the first period of Ottoman rule in the central territories of the kingdom (1540–90).15 The daily life of peasants, on the other hand, is described only superficially in official documents, and mostly in relationship to legal matters.16

Given this scarcity of sources, it would be foolish to hope to arrive at accurate mortality rates, and in particular mortality rates for times of subsistence crises and/or famines, in the Kingdom of Hungary between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era: the available documents provide no precise information, and they offer only a rather impressionistic and vague image of such events. However, there are good indicators, such as descriptions of the phenomena and their amplitudes, in sources of different types from more or less neighboring geographical areas; prohibitions on the export of alimentary goods and (more or less) simultaneous requests for their import; some information about prices and price increases (though the available sources are not detailed enough to allow us to arrive at any overview of continuous trends in price increases); interventions or regulations concerning prices and markets on which alimentary commodities were sold by local and/or central authorities. Archaeological investigations have also contributed useful information.

Despite these limitations, it is possible to reconstruct a coherent framework of the economic structures and arrive at a realistic picture of the impact of famines in the Kingdom of Hungary between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.

Market and Food in Medieval and Early Modern Hungary

The sources dating from between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, in particular those of a narrative character, agree in their characterizations of the Kingdom of Hungary as a fertile land, rich in waters, pastures, and woods, where farming and cattle-breeding were practiced with good results.17 At the beginning of the fourteenth century, an anonymous Dominican who traveled a lot in East and Central Europe reported that the Realm of Saint Stephen was rich not only in cereals, meat, fish, and wine, but also in salt, gold, and silver.18 Accordingly, the anonymous chronicler deduced that the ancient names of Messia and Panonia derived from abundant harvests and the availability of bread in Hungarian lands.19

The territorial expanse of the kingdom, Croatia included, was about 325,000 km2, and the average population density was very low. While some areas were more densely inhabited, in general land was available in great abundance, and most villages had a vast area for arable land, pasture, and woods at their disposal. Moreover, urbanization lagged far behind by Western European standards. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, most uncultivated land was colonized thanks to the arrival of hospites coming, above all, from the Holy Roman Empire.20 Colonization proceeded until the fourteenth century, but at the beginning of the fourteenth century the Kingdom of Hungary was still far from densely inhabited. For instance, only a few settlements were clearly identified as civitates.21 Density remained low, with considerable differences between individual regions. The situation may have partially changed by the beginning of the fifteenth century, but the overall size of the population of medieval Hungary (and therefore calculations concerning population density, mortality, etc.) remained a highly controversial issue on account of the lack of relevant sources. As Pál Engel remarks, “it is almost impossible to determine how large the population of Hungary was at the end of the Middle Ages. Indeed, current estimates vary between 2.5 million and 5.5 million, which only serves to underline the prevailing uncertainty surrounding this issue.”

In this sense, the size of the settlements varied greatly throughout the kingdom. The urban network of the Kingdom of Hungary included some 30–35 towns with urban privileges of various degree, but they were all small from a Western European perspective, and the urban population is estimated to have been no more than 3 percent of the total population. Buda had about 10,000 inhabitants; Sopron, Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia), Kassa (today Košice, Slovakia), Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), Brassó (today Braşov, Romania), Nagyszeben (today Sibiu, Romania) and the mining towns of Besztercebánya (today Banská Bystrica, Slovakia) and Selmecbánya (today Banská Štiavnica, Slovakia) about 4-5,000 each; Pest, Szeged, Székesfehérvár, Nagyszombat (today Trnava, Slovakia), Eperjes (today Prešov, Slovakia), Bártfa (today Bardejov, Slovakia), Lőcse (today Levoča, Slovakia), and the mining towns of Gölnicbánya (today Gelnica, Slovakia) and Körmöcbánya (today Kremnica, Slovakia) about 3,000 each. In the southern and southwestern part of Transdanubia and in the eastern edge of Transylvania there were hundreds of little villages with a population of well under 100, while in the Great Plain much larger villages were more common. These villages had at their disposal a large quantity of land, albeit with great differences between the various Hungarian territories. According to Engel, in the counties of Abaúj and Tolna the average village territory was around 2,800 acres at the end of the Middle Ages. Yet there existed great regional differences. The Great Plain was characterized by populous villages with extensive territories, whereas in the southern part of Transdanubia and south of the Drava small villages were more usual. For example, around 1500, in the County of Vas the extent of a village’s territory was 2,100 acres on average, while the corresponding figure in Zala was 1,700 acres.22

It is nevertheless important to underline two general features: a) there was a general trend of population increase; b) there was a large availability of land. These two elements, and above all the second one, affected the structures of production in the primary sector (agriculture and livestock) and led to economic specialization. Agriculture (cereals and wine) had represented an important economic sector in the kingdom’s economic structure since the twelfth century, although it was practiced above all through a periodic change of cultivated lands, given the abundance of available land. This remained the principal cultivation method, up to the first half of the thirteenth century, when it was progressively replaced by a more coherent system of open fields, most of which were still exploited in an extensive way, but with the use of more developed techniques (such as the two-field rotation and in some regions even the three-field rotation, as well as the assymmetrical heavy plough). Agricultural productivity increased from a yield of 1:2 at the beginning of the thirteenth century to 1 : 3–4 one century later.23 Nevertheless, livestock breeding (above all the raising of horse and oxen) maintained a fundamental economic role, in accordance with the traditional Hungarian nomadic and semi-nomadic forms of organization, as well as the abundance of land, forest, and pastures.24 Hunting and fishing were also notable natural resources, and in general not closed to peasants; only limited areas were subject to absolute royal and noble control.25

Thus, Hungarian lands produced and exported more agricultural products and livestock than they did raw materials, but they also exported mineral and metals like iron, copper, salt, gold, and silver, as well as slaves (at least up to the beginning of the thirteenth century). Imported goods were mostly luxury products: the crown, the royal court, and the nobility demanded these goods in great quantities. Italian, French, and German cloths of various quality were brought into the country from the West, as were jewels and handicraft products; from the East, goods like skins, wools, and cloths of different types were imported, along with wax and spices.26 Non-luxury items were also imported in large quantities, for instance knives, pottery, etc.27 A considerable share of the imported commodities passed through the region on its way to Eastern or Western Europe.

Western sources almost unanimously describe the Kingdom of Hungary as a land in which it was possible to make good profits through the exchange of Western luxury products for local livestock, precious metals, spices, and other Levantine articles. Unfortunately, the available sources do not enable us to reconstruct price levels continuously from the Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era. However, on the basis of the available documents, scholars agree that the difference in price between local and imported goods created many profitable bargains, above all for Italian and German mercatores, with a considerable outflow of cheap staples from Hungary to Western Europe.28

For instance, in 1376, the Florentine Bonaccorso Pitti was in Buda and, before going back to Italy, he decided to buy six Hungarian horses. Their local price was very low, though they were famous in Western markets, thus making it possible to make a good profit. During his journey home, Bonaccorso lost one horse, gave another away as a present, and sold two others, losing some of his profits through gaming. Nonetheless, he returned to Florence with two horses, 100 gold florins, and the satisfying experience of having made an excellent bargain.29 Other documents also indicate that the Kingdom of Hungary was rich with economic opportunities.30 At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the price of an ox in Hungary was around three or four florins, and a horse of average quality was not much more expensive. Bertrandon de la Broquière noted that in Hungary a horse of the best quality cost around ten florins, while in Western Europe it could cost as much as 50 florins. On the other hand, a cheap roll of Bohemian cloth could be bought for seven florins, while the same quantity of the best Italian cloth cost around 45 florins, that is, the price of 10-15 oxen.31

In this context, Hungarian households were able to produce a substantial share of their own food instead of purchasing it on the local markets. Of course, it was always possible to turn to the market, but only in cases of specific necessity. This allowed most of the Hungarian population to have almost continuous access to different alimentary resources, such as cereals, meat, and fish, and also to maintain a very diverse diet, not based almost entirely on cereals, as was the case in Western Europe. Moreover, long-distance trade did not affect the availability of food for the Hungarian population. Data gathered by Vera Zimányi confirms that before the ‘price revolution’ in the 1520s, for the price of an ox it was possible to have Moravian cloth [of average quality and largely accessible] sufficient for an item, an item and a half, of clothing; after the differentiating effects of the ‘price revolution’ around the 1580s, in exchange for an ox it was possible to buy cloth sufficient for 2 items and a half of clothing, and, in the 1600s, for 3 and 1/3. […] Livestock breeding, therefore, involved, temporarily, greater advantages than cloth production.32

On average, about 100,000 cattle were exported from the Hungarian lands per annum, with peaks of up to 200,000. In periods of strong demand, more cattle could be added from Moldavia and Wallachia through Transylvania. About four fifths of all cattle reached the Austrian, German, and Moravian markets, while about one fifth went to Venice. Only a few cattle were destined for the Ottoman lands (essentially to satisfy the demand of a section of the armed forces). It is calculated that in 1580 the total number of cattle was about 3 million. This would mean that, at least in that year, the exports comprised merely six per cent of the available livestock: evidently the rest remained available for domestic consumption.33

Indeed, meat was the main protein source for most of the inhabitants of the kingdom, and it played a central role in the Hungarian diet in the Middle Ages and in the Modern Era. If in the Hungarian lands the average annual consumption of cereals was about 112 kilograms (well below the European average, estimated at 175 kilograms), the consumption of meat was very high, 63 to 69 kilograms per capita (well above 50 kilograms in Nuremberg, 47 kilograms in the cities of southern Germany, and 26 kilograms in southern France). Moreover, the large size of the animals should also be kept in mind. Between the tenth and the twelfth centuries, Hungarian cattle lacked the special traits that became their distinguishing features by the sixteenth century, specificially the large size and large horns: these features were probably the product of a selection of species, even for commercial purposes, which took place over the course of several centuries; so, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the weight of an average Hungarian ox was about 300–350 kilograms, a figure which increased to about 450–500 kilograms by the beginning of the seventeenth century, while the European standard was 200 kilograms.34 Not surprisingly, in the Hungarian lands the production and consumption of cereals continued to have only limited importance until the middle of the eighteenth century, when Hungarian agricultural structures underwent a deep transformation, with an increasing economic and commercial integration into the Habsburg Empire and, as part of the Empire, Europe.35

In his Cronaca of 1348, the Florentine Matteo Villani offers information concerning some Hungarian alimentary habits based on meat and the importance of cattle-breeding in the local economy:

The Hungarians [...] are well and easily stocked with food even when they are in inhospitable places. This is because there is a large number of oxen and cows in Hungary which are not used to work the land; and since there are wide pastures in which to graze them, the animals grow faster and fatter. The animals are then slaughtered for leather and fat, which are heavily traded; the meat is boiled in large pots, and when it has been cooked and salted and separated from the bones, it is desiccated in ovens or in some other manner. Once dried, the meat is pulverized in a subtle mode; in this manner, it is preserved. And when they are traveling or marching with the army, when they cannot find anything to eat, they carry pots and copper vessels and each a small bag with this meat powder, as a war provision; and other bags are carried on carriages at the orders of their lord. And when they encounter a river or other water, they stop and fill their pots and pans with water; once the water has come to a boil, they add an amount of the pulverized flesh depending on the number of men who are eating. The meat powder grows and swells, and a handful or two of it can fill a pot with a kind of soup which is very nourishing to eat and which makes men vigorous with little bread, or even without bread.36

Between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, the general characteristics of production and exchange in the Kingdom of Hungary remained almost unchanged, including in regard to food. With the passing of time, a notable development in the internal market occurred, characterized by a greater use of money and a meaningful increase in commercial activities over short, medium, and long distances. Although the prices of the Hungarian products slowly but consistently increased, potentially these prices remained low in comparison with prices in the West. Thus, the exchange of Hungarian raw materials and livestock for Western and Eastern products (textiles in particular) remained profitable.37

The realm of Saint Stephen was rich in alimentary resources, which were easily accessible to a large stratum of the population. The levels of nutrition in the Kingdom of Hungary were therefore higher, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than in Western Europe. The normal diet of the kingdom’s inhabitants was based not only on cereals but also on fish and, above all, meat, which was available to most of the population. Even if there was a decrease in crops, it was always possible to fall back on the consumption of meat, or even pulse, fish and game.38

The kingdom of Hungary remained in this state of alimentary equilibrium for the whole of the Middle Ages and most of the Modern Era. The absence in the sources of mention of crises or famines suggests that in this period famine, which was cyclically frequent in other territories of Europe, was nearly, if not completely, unknown in Hungary. Furthermore, the structure of exchange in the kingdom also suggests that there were no enduring famines. Keeping in mind the general lacunae in the available documentation, there are very few traces of a resort to the import of alimentary goods (while there are some signs that they were exported), and very few indications of intervention or regulation of prices and markets of alimentary commodities by the crown or by another secular or ecclesiastical authority of the kingdom.39

I will now offer a brief survey of the main events related to hunger and famine in the Kingdom of Hungary between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.40

Crisis and Famine in the Thirteenth Century

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, hunger and famine were reported in 1044, 1074 (or 1075), and 1141. These dates all overlapped with periods of military conflicts, but unfortunately the sources do not permit a real analysis of the economic impact of the events of the wars. One should note that there were wars and conflicts in other years too, but no signs of other hunger or famine events.41

More interesting data are available beginning in the thirteenth century, when a great famine occurred in 1243/45. It was not caused by earlier or repeated bad harvests, however, or by correlated speculations. Rather, the famine was a direct consequence of the Mongol invasions and devastation wreaked by the Mongols, which led to a genuine collapse of the political, economic, and social structures of the kingdom in 1241/42.42 According to the Chronicon Austriacum, in 1243–45 famine took a much bigger toll on human lives than the previous invasions and devastations; in all likelihood, the episodes of cannibalism referred to by the author never took place, but they do give an idea of the emotional impact of the catastrophe on contemporary society.43 The destruction and demographic loss were certainly considerable, estimated to between 20 and 50 per cent of the entire population, and even higher, with high divergences among the different Hungarian territories.44

Another famine was recorded in 1263, in a period characterized by clashes between the Hungarian nobility and the crown, as well as conflicts within the royal family itself (with civil wars in 1262 and 1264–66 between king Béla IV and his son and heir Stephen). So, the uncertain political situation created by the trauma of Mongol invasions seems to have contributed to a breakdown of normal economic and commercial progress.45 In this context, the Chronicon Austriacum reported a maxima fames in 1263, not only in Hungary, but in most of East and Central Europe. Nevertheless, this generic report does not allow us to assess the real impact of the famine.46

Crisis and Famine in the Fourteenth Century

On the other hand, the same wartime events also triggered wide-ranging political, economic, and social changes which overlapped with: a) elements of the previous period of economic expansion and growth (which was interrupted by the trauma of the Mongol invasions); b) the political and economic reforms, institutional stability, and stronger royal power established by the new Angevin dynasty, with Charles I (1301–42) and his son Louis I the Great (1342–82);47 c) the so-called “advantage of backwardness” (as explained by Alexander Gerschenkron).48

In the fourteenth century, the Hungarian markets were still not adequately developed, and thus they offered profitable spaces for investment for European merchant capital, which had fallen on hard times. With the reorganization of the kingdom’s economic structures, Hungarian raw materials and livestock found extensive markets, and trade over short and long distances with the Italian Peninsula and the Holy Roman Empire suddenly grew considerably livelier. These innovations launched and favored dynamic and sustained economic development in the kingdom. The series of subsistence crises that struck Western Europe between 1315 and 1322 had a limited impact on the Hungarian lands.49 This economy continued to grow until at least the beginning of the fifteenth century, and this was followed by a further growth phase in the same century and in the next one, with a different economic cycle in comparison with Western Europe.50

In this political and economic context, fourteenth-century sources report on four main cases of increases in the prices of alimentary goods; three of these cases include mention of famine phenomenon and/or food crises of varying extents. Two events were just local and occurred in the northern regions of historical Hungary (in what today is Slovakia). In 1312, in the Szepesség (Spiš) region, the prices of alimentary goods increased to the point of causing a food crisis; prices increased again in 1316 in Pécsújfalu (today Pečovská Nová Ves, Slovakia), but without bringing about large scale famine.51 In all likelihood, these two episodes were influenced by the struggle for the throne, which divided the kingdom at the time.52 However, there is no evidence of large scale economic or demographic impact.

Two other events were of greater importance with regards to external factors. In 1338, a great locust invasion hit Transylvania, from Brassó up to Lippa (today Lipova, Romania): with the exception of the region around Arad (today Arad, Romania) region, locusts devoured a great share of the crops, triggering an increase in the prices of alimentary goods, which eventually ushered in a food crisis. The famine was not terribly prolonged, however, because summer rains forced the locusts to move westwards.53 A second event is reported to have taken place in 1363/64. The summer was remarkably dry, and it was followed by a hard winter. This caused a fall in agricultural production, which led to an increase in the prices of alimentary goods and therefore a food crisis. Even in this case, the famine was of limited significance. It was felt above all in the eastern territories and the markets of the Great Hungarian Plain. Moreover, with the intention of preventing food crises and famines of greater dimensions, King Louis I ordered his officers to locate and inventory the cereal stocks in order to put the surplus on the market.54

However, beginning in the fourteenth century, with the progressive involvement of the Kingdom of Hungary in the so-called “world economy,”55 crises and famines began to be reported with growing frequency, and they had an ever larger impact, even in prosperous periods, evidently in connection with the oscillations in the functioning of the market.56 Furthermore, wars (first and foremost the conflicts with the Ottoman Empire), caused considerable damage and led to problems in the food supply. However, warfare often created opportunities for profitable bargains.57

Crisis and Famine in the Fifteenth Century

In the fifteenth century, the Kingdom of Hungary played an important role in European politics and the European economy. The strong royal power of Sigismund of Luxemburg (1387–1437)58 and Matthias Corvinus (1458–90)59 and the prestige and valor of Filippo Scolari (Pipo Ozorai or Pippo Spano) (1369–1426)60 and John Hunyadi (c. 1407–56)61 made the crown of Saint Stephen strong again after the political crisis that had weakened the country after the extinction of the Angevin dynasty.

In the fifteenth century, most of the Hungarian political and economic resources were devoted to war. While the “centrifugal forces” of the nobility were thwarted by Sigismund after years of intense struggle, military pressure increased along the borders of the realm. In the north, the Hungarian lands were involved in the Hussite Wars, triggering far-reaching political, economic, and social transformations. In the West, clashes with the Habsburgs became inevitable. In the south, the struggles with the Ottoman Empire increased to the point of constant war. Other conflicts put Hungary in opposition to political entities in the Balkans and the Carpatho–Danubian area (first and foremost Serbia and Bosnia, Wallachia, and Moldavia), which were struggling to maintain an uneasy equilibrium between the long-established power of the Kingdom of Hungary and the increasing strength of the Ottoman Empire.62 Yet, despite the internal political difficulties and the almost endemic warfare along all of its frontiers, the kingdom enjoyed a phase of strong economic growth throughout the whole century.63

The events of the wars interfered with normal commercial activities; but often war was an occasion to make profits and bargains.64 For instance, in the summer of 1438, the eastern territories of Hungary suffered a large scale Ottoman invasion. All of the Transylvanian towns suffered huge damage, and many inhabitants were carried off as slaves.65 This brought about a partial interruption in the import of wheat from the Carpathian regions, a shortfall aggravated by attempts at speculation. For this reason, in January 1439 the authorities in Nagyszeben sent a missive to the authorities in Brassó urging the restoration of the normal flow of wheat imports from the south; in the case of a refusal, Nagyszeben threatened to close paths of communication between the north and Brassó. The sources do not allow us to know whether the city ever actually made good on its threat, nor do they indicate when the situation was normalized. But the attempt is evident: the municipal authorities of Brassó, taking advantage of the fact that their city was situated in a border area through which a significant share of the commodities coming from the Carpathian regions was being transmitted, tried to raise the price of wheat in the Transylvanian territories in order to make huge profits.66

Years of unfavorable climate could also lead to a poor harvest. Documents report on events of greater importance, such as hard winters in 1407/08, 1428/29, 1441–44, 1457/58, 1463, and 1491 and dry summers in 1460, 1463, 1473 (which also bore witness to a locust invasion), 1474, 1478–80, 1491, and 1493/94. In particular, the cold winter in 1428 and the warm summer in 1429 caused a fall in wheat and wine production, again limited to the eastern territories of the Great Hungarian Plain. Food crises of some importance occurred in 1456, 1463, 1470–74, and 1493/94.67

Nevertheless, the documents make no mention of events of widespread or prolonged hunger or famine in any of these years. In 1456, further difficulties arose because of the critical political and military situation of the Kingdom of Hungary. The Ottoman advances towards the west were halted at Belgrade in a battle led by John Hunyadi.68 For 1463, sources mention a particularly unfavorable year, with direct consequences for crops; but the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia, involving a reorganization of markets, probably had a greater impact on commercial exchange.69 In February 1470, King Matthias of Hungary forbade the Transylvanian Saxon towns from exporting “triticum, milium, avenam et alias fruges” to Wallachia in order to avoid a shortage of these products on the Hungarian markets.70 It is not possible to establish, however, whether this decision was motivated by a real shortfall of agricultural products in the eastern territories of the kingdom. Prolonged difficulties due to low crop yields were registered up to 1474.71

It is worth noting, however, that at the time a customs war was underway between the Kingdom of Hungary and the voevodate of Wallachia. The clash dated back to the times of Voevode of Wallachia Vlad III Ţepeş–Dracula (October 1448; 1456–62; November–December 1476), who tried to annul the staple right of the Transylvanian Saxon towns by creating a parallel line of border markets in Wallachian territory and to penetrate the Hungarian markets directly and secure the free circulation of Wallachian merchants in Transylvanian lands.72 So it is probable that the decision of 1470 was intended to protect the Hungarian markets, not only from the commercial threat posed by the Wallachian towns but also from the excessive dynamism of the Transylvanian Saxon towns, which made high profits from the exchange of commodities between East and West, often undermining the interests of the Kingdom of Hungary. Sources do not reveal whether or not the import ban actually took place or, if it did, how it was enforced. The customs war between the Kingdom of Hungary and the voevodate of Wallachia certainly dragged on for a long time. Thus, in all likelihood, it was a combination of political conflicts and adverse climatic factors that badly affected the normal course of the market, giving rise to a new famine in Transylvania in 1493/94.73 Events affected above all the chief urban centers, but not the surrounding villages: for instance, Brassó faced a stagnation of its population in the town center, but not in its outlying territories.74

In conclusion, in the fifteenth century neither wars nor bad harvests exerted a considerable influence on the availability of foodstuffs in the Kingdom of Hungary, and they certainly did not give rise to famines. Only on a few occasions do documents make mention of increases in prices, and they contain no references to alimentary crises of vast proportions. Mentions of hunger and underfeeding are also rare.

Crisis and Famine in the Sixteenth Century

In the sixteenth century, Hungarian territories were characterized by a notable institutional instability and prolonged external and internal wars. The defeat at Mohács (1526), the tripartite division of the kingdom (1541), and the Treaty of Speyer (1570) left the ancient lands of Saint Stephen in a situation of confusion and war, to which the most deleterious effects of famine and the decrease or relocation of the population were added.75 Nevertheless, in the middle of the century the situation quickly normalized in connection with the integration of western and northern Hungarian territories into the Habsburg dominions, the formation of the Ottoman Vilayet of Buda, and the creation of the autonomous Principality of Transylvania. Therefore, in the sixteenth century, a phase of political decadence was not accompanied by a parallel economic decline. A partial adjustment of the commercial network and the exchange flows took place. Documents suggest that merchants of different origins operating in the area looked for and easily opened new and convenient commercial paths. Imports of large consumer goods increased (including cheap textiles from the East and the West), as did exports of raw materials (agricultural products and livestock to the East and the West).76 Hungarian lands were becoming increasingly integrated into the European markets.77

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the so-called Little Ice Age began to affect the entire European continent, and it reached its peak in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Little Ice Age was characterized by increasingly adverse and unstable climatic conditions, which influenced all the spheres of the economy and agriculture in particular. Nevertheless, the shift in the climate did not have an absolutely negative impact on the agriculture, because the disappearance of some crops brought about the introduction of others (including new ones) in the different climatic areas of the continent. Thus, famine was not the product of periodic and ordinary climatic adversities; on the contrary, more often famine was tied to some short term, anomalous, and extreme climatic perturbation, aggravated by the poor functioning of the markets.78

In this context, Hungarian documents report on three famines of local importance: in 1529–31 (when abundant rains and bloody wars for the Hungarian throne between the supporters of Ferdinand of Habsburg and John Szapolyai caused a crop failure), in 1545 (caused at least in part by an invasion of locusts and the continuous wars against the Ottomans), and in 1553 (after a very severe winter). Sixteenth-century documents also refer to another seven years characterized by severe and widespread famines with high mortality rates. The first event was recorded in 1507/08. It was caused by excessive rains and floods, followed by a period of drought. These events caused a food shortage on all of the Hungarian markets, with a general increase in the price of food and the emergence of intense speculation (“magna caristia rerum”).79 Between 1534 and 1536, unfavorable climatic events were recorded: they caused a shortage of various goods, followed by a steep increase in prices. In 1534, a cubulus (80–85 litres)80 of wheat could cost 18 silver coins in Brassó, 12 in Medgyes (today Mediaş, Romania), 14 in Nagyszeben, and up to 3½ gold florins in other territories of Transylvania; the following year, the price of a cubulus of wheat rose to six gold florins. The price of livestock witnessed an analogous rise: a cow could cost six gold florins, a calf 60 silver coins, and a sheep 12 silver coins. Thus, a food crisis of vast proportions was recorded, marked by high mortality rates.81 The excessive drought and the persistent war caused a new food shortage of alimentary goods between 1574 and 1575, with the hardships continuing up to 1577 in some regions. To limit damages and losses, between April and May, the Diet of Transylvania decreed a general tax reduction and total tax exemption for unmarried young people, wage-earning servants, and people belonging to other categories with low incomes.82 Drought again caused low crop yields, and food prices rose between 1585 and 1586: in Kolozsvár and Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureş, Romania) a cubulus of wheat ended up costing six gold florins.83

There were other examples of crisis and famine in Transylvania, one of the most economically developed lands in the kingdom. It is interesting to note that, in the sixteenth century, famines had a greater impact in the Transylvanian lands before and after the division of the Kingdom of Hungary. Historical data show that in sixteenth-century Transylvania, over a period of 80 years, crop yields were of exceptional quantity in 28 seasons, on an average level in 27 years, below the average in 18 (only three of which were characterized by limited hunger of only local impact), and in seven years crops were not available in sufficient quantities, resulting in widespread famine.84 Of course, throughout the entire century, these territories were marked by bloody clashes, but the war also offered occasions to make profits. Indeed, Transylvania consistently remained very active from the point of view of commerce, as it was in a favorable position of mediation between East and West. Although it remained in a basically marginal position from a European perspective, Transylvania functioned as an important market up to the Modern Era.85 Even the famines recorded in Transylvania were closely connected to a malfunctioning of the local markets: in particular, in periods of exceptional difficulty (a drop in the harvest, environmental shocks, or events caused by the war), the absence of suitable policies for food imports or price regulation could favor a rise in the prices of food and consequently lead to crisis and famine.86

It is evident that, also in the sixteenth century, famines in the Hungarian territories were conditioned not only by external elements, such as poor harvests, environmental shocks, events cause by the war, and so on, but above all by a malfunctioning of the markets. In fact, in other periods when wars, unfavorable climatic events, and/or crop failures were recorded, there were neither famines nor higher mortality rates, and even the prices of food did not go up. Moreover, it is interesting to note that, although in general the sixteenth century represents a period of political and institutional crisis in Hungary, major demographic crises (which involved significant drops in the population and the desertion of villages and whole regions) only occurred at the end of the century as a result of all of these factors, eventually combined with climatic changes. Thus, the huge population decrease which took place in the last part of the century was not the result of famines.

Conclusion – An Alimentary Equilibrium

Documents and observations thus apparently confirm the hypothesis that it is possible to apply the models of crise de type ancient by Ernest Labrousse and entitlement approach by Amartya K. Sen to the Kingdom of Hungary between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era to clarify the appearance and evolution mechanisms of crisis and famine in a preindustrial and industrial context (according to a non-Malthusian approach).

In comparison with other parts of Europe, in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era alimentary alternatives in Hungary, such as wheat, meat, and fish, remained accessible to most of the population, which maintained free access to the alimentary resources (agricultural and sylvan-pastoral). Consequently, the normal diet remained diversified and not entirely based on cereals or on wheat, in particular. This permitted the maintenance of an alimentary equilibrium which, in part because it was based on a wide and comparatively diverse array of foods (and on meat in particular), prevented the rise of vast alimentary crises and famines, unless a shock such as war or climatic changes occurred. Moreover, the production and exchange structures were very specific. Raw materials and agricultural articles, in which the country abounded, were exported, while imports consisted mainly of specific luxury articles demanded by the crown, the nobility, and the wealthiest social groups of the kingdom. As a consequence of this economic situation, the Hungarian population turned to the market only in cases of specific necessity, and rarely merely to obtain necessary foodstuffs.87

Western Europe had also had a similar alimentary regime, characterized by vast access to resources and based above all on meat, but this was between the Early and High Middle Ages.88 In the most developed and integrated markets of Western Europe, between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era, cereals and wheat in particular had emerged as the almost exclusive basis of nourishment. The shortage of these goods, the production of which was subject to significant fluctuations as it depended on seasonal rhythms and not (or not completely) on market movement, led to increases in their prices. Therefore, given the rigid wage system and the lack of alimentary alternatives that might be socially approved, and in the absence of adequate policies to complement supplies, shortages could easily lead to famines with large impacts and even to a fall in demand and production (sometimes of significant proportions) of non-agricultural goods and services until the phase of economic crisis passed.89

In contrast, although increasingly integrated into the European markets, Hungary did not suffer periods of serious famine because it preserved an alimentary equilibrium and the free access of its population to the food resources in most of the regions of the kingdom. Engel notes that on the whole, by the 1500s the living conditions of the peasantry had improved rather than deteriorated. They could freely change their place of residence, they were allowed to bear arms and to hunt and they sometimes even took the field alongside the nobles. […] Famine was a rare visitor among them. Although sometimes there was less bread than necessary [...], they had no difficulty in supplementing their diet with pulse, meat, fish and even game. As the density of the population remained rather low, there were abundant expanses of woodland and pasture throughout the country. At the beginning of the sixteenth century an average household raised two or three cattle and—at least in the eastern part of the kingdom—no fewer than eight pigs, not to mention poultry. In the 1510s it was quite natural for the servants of the domain of Ónod to eat meat every day, sometimes even twice, and we have no reason to believe that the diet of the peasantry in general was significantly worse.90

The complex economic interaction of difficulties due to crop yields, climate, war, and famine, together with the responses of the institutional framework to these factors, are evidence of the economic dynamism and increasing and notable maturation of the Hungarian market, as well as its growing integration into and role as a mediator between Western and Eastern markets between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.91

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* This paper is based in part on the following conference papers: Andrea Fara, Crisis and Famine in the Kingdom of Hungary in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Period (XIIIth–XVIth centuries), in XVth World Economic History Congress, Utrecht, August 3rd–7th, 2009 – Session B6, Medieval Central– and Southeast Europe: Towards a New Economic and Social History; Idem, Some Considerations about Crisis and Famine in East–Central Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Period (XIIIth–XVIth centuries), in 7th CEU Conference in Social Sciences: “What Follows after the Crisis? Approaches to Global Transformations.” Budapest, Central European University, May 27th–29th, 2011.

Discursive (De)Constructions of the Depoliticized Private Sphere in The Resolution and Balaton Retro

Zsolt Győri

University of Debrecen

In this article I examine Gyula Gazdag and Judit Ember’s documentary The Resolution [A határozat, 1972] and Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s Balaton Retro [Balaton retró, 2007] as examples of the discursive production of paradoxes permeating the consolidated Kádár regime. I present the first film, portraying the character assassination of József Ferenczi (the executive manager of the Felcsút cooperative farm in the early 1970s) as a case study of state socialist technologies of power and strategies of constructing the narrative of the immoral and profiteering leader type, the corrupted servant of the community. This fabricated narrative is actually contested by members of the cooperative farm for whom Ferenczi is a symbol of the reform spirit and the promise of prosperity. I argue that the critical power of the film resides both in its meticulous dissection of the discursive and administrative methods used to create enemy images and its reluctance to present a local example of vilification as a general feature of the state socialist episteme. The Resolution presents the consolidated Kádár regime as an establishment torn between rigid ideological foundations and society’s desire for a depoliticised market economy, suffering from the political pressure to remain true to the spirit of communism and the social pressure to allow a greater degree of economic liberalism.

In Balaton Retro the popular tourist destination, Lake Balaton, is constructed as a spatial metaphor of both the crisis of the authoritarian system and of Goulash Communism (the name given to the system in Hungary, which constituted a quiet deviation from orthodox doctrines of Marxism-Leninism). The popular notion of the lake as the Hungarian Riviera came into being at the intersection of eastern and western understandings of welfare: on the one hand, the welfare state providing workers cheap holiday opportunities through a network of state-run holiday apartments and camps for children, and on the other, individual welfare, the possessors of which (usually citizens of Western Europe) sought leisure in modern luxury hotels. The emergence of private houses available for well-salaried Hungarian customers was another sign of the many dualities and hybrid meanings uncovered by Papp’s film as symptoms of the general state of the nation during the Kádár era. My analysis of the agency of the voiceover narration will reveal that Balaton Retro is not a manifestation of Ostalgie, but a critical meta-commentary on nostalgic memory. To conclude, I will describe retro as the commodification of a material past and nostalgia as a somewhat sinister legacy of state socialist identity politics.

Keywords: Kádár era, Goulash Communism, cinema, representations of communism, retro, post-communist nostalgia, documentaries

Introduction

Meditating on the nature of commemorations of the 1956 October events, Béla Pomogáts observed that the impassioned anniversary speeches, the lofty rhetoric, the lavish settings, and extravagant bouquets fail to address the moral heritage and teachings of the revolution: “The cult takes the form of heightened celebration, yet the ceremonies are almost exclusively governed by political interests…politics which, most of the time, is clearly party politics.”1 A decade later and in the wake of the 60th anniversary commemorations, this observation is still relevant; the quiet erosion of the revolutionary heritage and commitment to values such as solidarity, dignity, and national consensus continues. Pomogáts was only one of the many survivors, artists, and scholars who warned that the continued exploitation of the legacy to legitimize specific political ends seriously undermined the unique historical status of 1956 in cultural memory and turned it into a historical commodity put into the service of the political elite’s power struggle. The same applies to the Kádár regime, the haunting legacy of which remains unprocessed and insufficiently interrogated. In his acceptance speech at the 2004 Frankfurt book fair for a literary peace prize, Péter Esterházy noted that the shared European duty to problematize national burdens and address the past with honesty is overshadowed by amnesia in Hungary (and in other Eastern European countries), where the open-endedness of the memory-work and the tiresome communal effort to overcome national traumas has discouraged people from undertaking such a task and undermined their willingness to take responsibility for the past.2

The corrupted political culture of today and the “war of memory” surrounding events of the recent past vastly contributed to the lack of communal support for any confrontation with historical traumas, but they also proved that the retrospective production and frequent reconsideration of the past is an essential feature of political regimes lacking legitimacy and popular support. As is the case elsewhere in the region, Hungarian scholars have felt both the increasing political pressure and the popular demand for a consumable historical narrative that would relieve people of the toil of having to work through the past. This demand would sound cynical had historiography been a purely objective, empirical, and positivist academic discourse. However, as Zsolt K. Horváth notes, the historical discipline is also “a social praxis and as such, the knowledge it generates—given the primal role connectivity of memory plays in processes of identity-formation—is intimately linked to power elites.”3 In some cases historiography was mobilized as an auxiliary force of mundane political aims, yet the majority of the scholarly community insisted on professional standards and accountability while exploring new research methods and integrating new areas of archival research.

Historians and the various critical narratives they have offered of the state socialist period could not be expected to serve as an adequate substitute for communal confrontation with the legacy of this period. However, the meticulous exploration of the characteristic features of this legacy have made historians increasingly reliant on the audiovisual medium. Réka Sárközy’s monograph Elbeszélt múltjaink: a magyar történelmi dokumentumfilm útja [Our narrated pasts: The paths of Hungarian historical documentaries], for instance, offers a concise introduction to the generic development, politics, and poetics of historical documentaries, including a comprehensive analysis of films from the 1950s to the present. The chapters dedicated to documentaries of the 1980s,4 which Sárközy describes as films of “a useable past which perceive the cinematic medium as an instrument with which to change the present,”5 are the most relevant to my discussion here. As Sárközy asserts,

 

addressing varied topics and allowing for multiple points of view, the documentaries hope to confront a society—which was a passive collaborator in state offences—with its past and invite people to examine their parts in this(…) the artistic, scientific, and political stake of these films was to reinterpret archives, cleanse them of political influences, and uncover an interpretation which allows the past to be used by progressive practices of the present.6

As the above passage suggests, and as I have argued elsewhere,7 filmmakers contested the corrupting mechanisms of amnesia and appealed to the therapeutic function of collective memory-work. Oral history became a discourse which both revealed the fabrications of official memory politics and supported the empowerment of collective identity through the shared task of coming to terms with the past. Post-socialist historians shared the conviction of documentary filmmakers that narratives of the recent history could raise awareness of the mechanics of power, stereotyping, stigmatization, and the formation of social hegemonies in the present. They believed historical research should catalyze public discussion and self-critical reexaminations of the past by deciphering paradoxes and the dark legacy of state socialism, which hindered the development of civic attitudes and created hypocritical imaginations of national identity. The political appeal of such critical dialogue often proved counterproductive among the general public, which demanded depoliticized narratives allowing for strong affective investments. Svetlana Boym’s assertion concerning the post-Soviet situation offers an apt characterization of Hungarian developments:

 

glasnost intellectuals themselves, with their sense of moral responsibility and passionate earnestness, have become a forgotten tribe and fallen out of fashion… The collective trauma of the past was hardly acknowledged; or if it was, everyone was seen as an innocent victim or a cog in the system only following orders. The campaign for recovery of memory gave way to a new longing for the imaginary ahistorical past, the age of stability and normalcy.8

Social memory sought relief in the past of the private sphere detached from “ambivalence, the complexity of history and the specificity of modern circumstances,”9 the sphere Boym describes as the homeland of restorative nostalgia: “a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment.”10

Nostalgia’s invention of prelapsarian and authentic communism and the advent of the retro-industry also increased the demand for images of the quotidian aspects of “really existing socialism” and led to the visual commodification of the past. Whereas the historian always considers the constructive relationship between filmmaker and filmed reality and, in effect, presumes that “the (historical) document is not reality, but a linguistic representation that ascribes to it a specific value-structure and power status,”11 retro memory does not necessarily make this distinction and promotes non-ideological identification with both the repackaged material heritage and previous social and cultural rites. As Elizabeth E. Guffey claims, “retro offers an interpretation of history that taps nostalgia and an undercurrent of ironic understanding. Steeped in satire and humor, retro’s revivalist imagery has made its way into the mainstream, shaping how the recent past is presented.”12 As the newly emerging consumer society sought to fight its battle with forgetting in the realms of popular culture, the seriousness of memory was overtaken by the new fashion for amusing historical spectacle.

This article explores the discursive binary of the state-socialist legacy (which crystalizes in the critical-reflexive and the nostalgic-retro approaches) with reference to Gyula Gazdag’s and Judit Ember’s The Resolution and Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s Balaton Retro. Relying on Maya Nadkarni’s arguments concerning the makeup of post-socialist nostalgia, I contend that this memory genre is symptomatic of how citizens and social groups perceive the political sphere and the politicization of the public sphere. According to Nadkarni, retro nostalgia “challenged current regimes of value in post-socialism by finding worth in the cultural detritus of a past once reviled as inauthentic.”13 Thus, it sought to return to an apolitical quotidian world of innocence and stability “where the sharp divide between the private domestic sphere and the public world of political action was the very condition of political subjectivity.”14 Retreat from political activity as a way to maintain one’s personal integrity became the norm and added to the collective sense of identity during the Kádár era. According to Nadkarni, this withdrawal from the public sphere, coupled with fantasies of consumer plentitude, Western wages, and Western lifestyles (constituents of an imaginary elsewhere that promised a return to normalcy), was a symptom of an infantilized citizenry and a society that gradually conformed to being treated as a group of children by a paternalistic-patronizing political elite. Infantilization was a political strategy, while the anti-political attitude citizens were encouraged to cultivate was less an authentic expression of resistance than it was the premeditated space of neutralized resistance. The regime change, in this narrative, marked the moment of “a collective coming-of-age, in which the demise of paternal authority brought about a painful but necessary loss of innocence,”15 while the historical emotion of nostalgia released in the wake of this identity crisis expressed the desire for the insular private realm. There was mounting disappointment in and disapproval of the new political elite, which was blamed for the emerging economic-moral instability, and with large segments of society embracing anti-politics as resistance, the post-socialist citizenry was recaptured by the infantile subject position of imaginary independence constructed during the previous era.

Gyula Gazdag’s and Judit Ember’s The Resolution (made in 1972, censored until 1984, and made available for general audiences only after 1989) is a vivid illustration of the overpoliticised and corrupt public sphere from which there is no retreat apart from illusionary detachment. Having been judged unsuitable for public release and thus doomed to oblivion, the film offers expressive evidence of its non-agreement with official notions of social purposiveness. In order to safeguard the corrupted public sphere, the censors had no choice but to ban the film, which, instead of celebrating the regime, debunked its methods of infantalizing citizens and groups. The Resolution shared the ethical mission of sociographic documentaries described by Horváth as the liberation of reality from rigid ideological discourse.16 It achieved this aim through a method Ferenc Hammer characterises as follows: “[t]he political nature of exploring reality is brought to the surface by the objective gaze of the camera, which unveils the lies of the everyday routine and the oppressive apparatuses of interests.”17 The objective gaze of the camera as a promise to portray actual events and characters (Realism), observe characters and capture the normal, non-artificially dramatized tempo of life (situational filming), and use film as a methodologically solid description of the social sphere (Positivism) is expressive of the proactive attitude adopted by Gazdag and Ember in their film. The historical narrative presented in The Resolution bears witness to both history-from-below and the drama-of-lived-reality as it strives to capture how “reality ‘performs’ and reveals itself with its own resources and ordinary dynamics.”18 More importantly from the perspective of the present discussion, while presenting the battle of an agricultural cooperative president with demagogic bureaucrats who want to expel him publicly, the film reveals the paternalistic practices of forcing rigid political categories and narratives onto the private sphere. As historical meta-commentary, The Resolution documents how the Kádár regime, in its efforts to eradicate the private sphere and nationalize society, was driven not by the grandiose historical mission of communism, but by the pressure to conceal its own legitimacy crisis. I argue that the film renders legible these acts of concealment by capturing the private moments of the regime’s bureaucrats and exposing their political fanaticism. As Ember noted, “filmmakers capable of seizing the human face and gestures in the very moment when they look and sound dishonest are filmmakers with a mission.”19 My analysis situates The Resolution in the context of existing historical research and treats it as an authentic account of how the consolidated Kádár regime sought to secure social support for its weakened ideological foundations and struggled with demons of its own.

Gábor Zsigmond Papp is a key Hungarian representative of the “freelance historian” who emerged “outside the mainstream of artistic and historical thought. This dynamic and ever-changing group of artists, architects, designers, and writers revisit the past not as scholars but as non-professional historians. Their memorialization of the recent past emerges not through traditional historical research but through the identification and acquisition of objects from the recent past, as well as the replication of its images and styles.”20 Balaton Retro recycles images, sounds, and didactic voiceover commentaries into a collage that transforms the geographical location of Hungary’s largest holiday resort into the cultural space of popular imaginations and emotional and intellectual investments. Archival footage of Lake Balaton could have been easily used as a warehouse for restorative nostalgia, yet Papp, I contend, employs this footage as an assortment of documents of the imaginary anti-political subjectivity and childlike citizenry discussed by Nadkarni of a society willing to enjoy the dream projected by Goulash Communism. The parallels drawn in the film between Lake Balaton as the grand jewel of post-socialist nostalgia and the chief symbol of Goulash Communism allows me to further investigate the paradoxes of the private sphere as an illusionary site of detachment from politics. I conclude by proposing a direct link between the identity politics of retreat and the contemporary expansion of political populism.

In principle, this article investigates the failure to establish privacy as a position of authentic political resistance under state-socialism and analyses two films as exemplary narratives of this continuous failure, the legacy of which continues to haunt present-day political habitus in Hungary.

The Resolution: the (Failure of the) Discursive Construction of the Corrupt Farm President21

Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Kádár regime eased political control over various sectors of society and introduced a new model which, according to Tibor Valuch,

 

was styled ‘loosening and opening’–a gradual loosening from the fetters of dogmatically interpreted Marxist socialist ideology and from the country’s isolation from the wider cultural and scientific world, and an opening up to new intellectual ideas and approaches, to the mass media and, later on, information technologies that were increasingly shaping everyday lives, to new trends in the arts, and to the new findings that scientific and scholarly work was throwing up.22

A key element of the regime’s consolidation was the reforms introduced in the economic sector; the 1968 initiation of the New Economic Mechanism (NEM) had a significant impact on agricultural policies, most notably on cooperative farms: newly established auxiliary branches increased the volume of investment for non-farm products and better capacity utilization rates increased profitability and strengthened labor-intensive units. These pragmatic measures were initiated to increase productivity levels and reduce the country’s reliance on the import of agricultural goods. However, as Zsuzsanna Varga points out, they led to serious conflicts between trade pressure groups represented in both national and local bodies of the party apparatus. The strongest of these pressure groups campaigned for industrial workers and, having successfully claimed their primary role in socialist industrialization, overcame the arguments of agricultural interest groups. Their victory set off a retaliatory offensive and a wave of show-trials against more than a thousand cooperative presidents,23 legal procedures to which Árpád Pünkösti referred as early as 1985 as witch hunts.24 Since “the single party system did not allow for the direct clash of interests,”25 and because these conflicts were hard to resolve on economic grounds, representatives of the heavy industry interest group choose to fight the battle on ideological grounds. Varga’s research is founded on records of central administration which make frequent references to social interests, the supremacy of state ownership over cooperative ownership, and ideological arguments proposed by heavy industry delegates who deemed higher wages for agricultural workers unacceptable and warned of the dangers of labor migration from the cities to the countryside.26 Fears of intensifying social conflicts strengthened the anti-reform group led by Béla Biszku and urged the government to undermine the liberalization process initiated by the reform-communist wing of the party.

The correspondence between the termination of the NEM and the witch hunts targeting farm presidents serves as the historical context of the events depicted in The Resolution. The film refers to its historical period by (re)constructing the hermeneutical context in which the ideological fabrication of the immoral, egoistic, and criminal-minded president of the Felcsút New Life Cooperative Farm takes place. Focusing on the conceptual and discursive construction at work in the character assassination of József Ferenczi in a show trial, The Resolution is a meta-discursive document of the post-NEM years. Gazdag and Ember do not tell the story of how local party apparatchiks in collaboration with members of the cooperative farms manage to overthrow a corrupt leader. On the contrary, they document how cooperative democracy is violently curtailed and how attempts to replace Ferenczi fail as cooperative members stand beside their falsely accused president. The meta-discursive quality of the film is established by its makers’ strategy of pointing out the inconsistencies between the discursive production of the public sphere and the corresponding politicization and denial of the private.

Two informal conversations recorded at the local party bureau frame the film. Although these dramatic reenactments of rare intimate moments cannot be regarded as “objective” documents, they are documents of the “authenticity” of privacy, and they aptly illustrate how the private sphere was politicized. With the introduction of bureaucratic types whose gestures and oratorical performances are farcical, viewers are admitted into the formalities and rituals of decision-making, or, in this case, the mechanics of constructing images of the enemy. These scenes capture the mood in which political conspiracies take root and an ideologically partial and deceitful public sphere is discursively fabricated. “The decision is already made, our main concern is its implementation” (06:38–06:41) rings like the thesis statement of any show-trial. The implementation is problematic, since Ferenczi is willing to resign only if his personal reputation is not compromised and he will not have to face further consequences for offences he never committed. This is not an option for the local party representatives, who wish to condemn Ferenczi publicly for moral and financial damages. It is essential that the concept of the corrupt farm president combine criminal, immoral, and anti-social aspects, since these aspects amplify the threat he poses to the community and, furthermore, legitimize both the complex network of state institutions that safeguard socialist morality and the harsh methods used to discipline opportunistic enemies of the system. Gyula Estélyi, the leader of the conversation and chief secretary of the local party committee, clarifies what implementation means in this case: on the one hand, the conceptualization of the corrupt farm president and, on the other, arranging public meetings where this concept will be tested, disseminated, and approved by members of the cooperative. As a dramatic finale of the character assassination, the general assembly will grant public support for the practices of intimidation, and it will force Ferenczi to resign by taking a democratic vote.

As the film testifies, Estélyi and his associate functionaries are ready to enforce the decision and fight their battle on more than one front. They consider the possibility of general support for the president, and although the possible resistance of the coop members is referred to as a potential hindrance, they agree that a direct democratic mechanism must be ensured: “the party makes suggestions, makes an assessment, tries to help, but if people do not need this help, they have the right of veto, the right to a secret ballot, the right to raise a hand” (14:16–14:32). After this cynical and paternalist demonstration of his commitment to participatory democracy, he urges the comrades to act upon the people’s communist consciousness and remind them of their responsibility to advance socialism. In other words, Estélyi wishes to solicit support for his claims not by making an appeal to the self-conscious proletarian, but by reminding people of the ideals they should follow in individual decisions and private conduct. This appeal to hypocritical behavior is a symptom of the public sphere’s artificial authenticity, and it is expressive of an expectation according to which ideologically correct thoughts, feelings, and attitudes must reign over the private sphere. In addition, certain strategies of intimidation are also proposed, as Estélyi requests that his comrades emphasize at future meetings the long-term negative consequences for cooperative members should they continue to support Ferenczi. In another cynical gesture, he contemplates how members will learn from their mistakes before they comprehend the benefits of cooperative democracy. Hence, the retaliatory-disciplinary logic is extended and the whole collective will suffer for its deviation from the ideologically correct path. The concept of the corrupt president is supplemented with the concept of the corrupted community, both of which have, according to the official discourse, violated the practice of peaceful socialist coexistence.

The main body of The Resolution covers the “implementation” phase of the decision, in other words, the practical application of the discriminative concept. At the board meeting of the farm, the head of the district bureau (the supervisory board of the cooperative) claims that Ferenczi has lost political support. He proposes his removal and requests all participants to toe the party line. To emphasize the legitimacy of this paternalist request, general charges are listed, including the employment of an ex-convict associated with prostitution, undermining the reputation of the village, wasting the assets of the cooperative, increasing the budget for entertainment costs, and the private use of the company car.27 Apart from the indisputable proof of the first charge, all additional accusations are declared false by Ferenczi, whom we see for the first time in the film and whose emotionally upset yet logical speech gives an itemized reply to the complaints: the pimp, a certain Fischer, was hired by comrade Szűcs, one of his present accusers; during his presidency, the cooperative became more productive and provided higher living-standards for residents; entertainment costs are negligible in view of total operational costs; no illegal payment or car-use took place; and the local party bureau had fully supported him until its recent turnaround.28 Ferenczi’s methodical invalidation of the charges brought against him and, furthermore, his passionate concluding insistence that, “I will not leave this farm blemished and blackened” (33:34–33:36) indicate that he is aware of both the witch hunt targeting his person and the provocative discursive strategies on which it is based. Other members of the executive board side with Ferenczi and question the moral grounds for the character assassination. They suggest that the president had always valued the interests of the community over his own. Sensing the failure to build a strong grassroots base in their anti-Ferenczi campaign, the strategists who craft the techniques of intimidation adopt more explicit meausures culminating in blackmail when the chief-accountant of the company announces that the lack of political support for the president may result in the withdrawal of a national bank credit worth 10 million forint. He also adds that this sum would have to be raised by members, an absurd claim which, nevertheless, indicates the desperate desire of the functionaries to continue with the discriminatory process.

In the next round of the discursive boxing match, at the general meeting of the local party organization, Ferenczi presents the annual accounts and leaves, allowing the party members to discuss the controversies surrounding his activities. The verbal responses of the party members are as revealing as the images lingering on the frustrated, angry, desperate faces of the participants. These facial gestures, which constitute intimate bodily reactions to the malicious attacks, demonstrate people’s unwillingness to play the public roles they are expected to play and pretend to be ideal cadres. These are the faces of people irritated by the intrusion of politics into their private affairs, people who would rather be pragmatic than dogmatic. This attitude is affirmed by the research of Pünkösti, and more specifically the words of an ex-farm president, Semjén István: “[coop] members were able to evaluate the performance of the president in a more complex manner than paragraphs can ever hope to. Despite minor character flaws, most presidents possessed qualities that made them effective and suitable leaders. Applying laws to measure the worth of such people is like allowing a bull in a china shop.”29 Similar opinions are heard at the general meeting, emphasizing the president’s good planning and management skills, his financial intelligence, and the importance of continuity. A speaker praises the auxiliary branches and their contribution to the national industry, and he points out how they decrease the number of commuters, reduce the migration of qualified labor from the countryside to industrial towns, and contribute to the development of rural Hungary. These arguments were listed by the agricultural pressure group led by Lajos Fehér; nevertheless, spoken by a simple laborer, these words reflect direct social experience and demand pragmatism and economic rationality instead of ideological populism and moral judgements. Another member of the audience touches upon an extremely sensitive topic when asking whether there would be any consequences for the local party bureau if the resolution to remove Ferenczi failed, that is, if the victimization procedure ended in public defeat. Instead of a proper answer, the main speaker gives the following instructions: “like it or not, the party resolution is binding for all party members, so everyone must implement the resolution proposed by the higher authorities” (01:00:16–01:00:28). Potential traitors are threatened with disciplinary action, which sounds like just another empty intimidating remark provided that votes are cast by secret ballot. Nevertheless, it is also a clear symptom of the aspiration to put private choice under ideological control.

The general assembly is the forum which grants social legitimacy for the concept of the corrupt president and ensures that the witch hunt commences with the support of the public. The vote, at the same time, is also about the social acceptance of party rituals that penetrate into their lives, that is, the degree to which they are ready to collaborate with the political leadership in acting out ideologically prescribed roles. With the rising stakes, the anti-Ferenczi rhetoric also reaches new heights and, on top of the already voiced criticism of the president, new accusations are made, like the negative press coverage of Felcsút in the national press and the allegations concerning the excessive salary of the president and occasional transactions involving family members. Bringing up the topic of financial profiteering seems a calculated move, and it reflects the high priority of income levels and material wealth in people’s decisions. Hence, the accusers make a final attempt to present their case on ideological grounds and employ the dichotomy of self-interest and group-interest, while at the same time they appeal to more base human sentiments, like envy and resentment. Repeated references to the moral, financial, and legal consequences members will have to face should they reject the resolution give the impression that the vote is also about the future of the company and imply that cooperative democracy works best when group interests (the interest of the members) are subordinated to ideological interests (the idea of egalitarianism). After the secret ballot has been cast and the votes have been counted, results show a majority for the pro-Ferenczi camp. The feeling of relief is interrupted by the head of the district council, an associate of the party bureaucrats, who announces that a 2/3 majority is required for the vote to be valid. After checking the relevant legal passages, he retracts this statement and the assembly is disbanded.

In the final section of the film, viewers watch the company of familiar functionaries discuss the lessons they have learned. They unanimously agree on the legitimacy of the initial concept and decision, but they point to serious mistakes in the methods of implementation and express regret for not having been able to prove Ferenczi’s criminal nature, political defects, and unorthodox leadership techniques. Speculations are made as to whether they should have settled for disciplinary action instead of trying to remove him and agree on the need for closer cooperation among the separate bureaus, offices, and councils and for more temperate and patient agitprop activities. Criticism from party headquarters, summarized by Estélyi with the question, “[w]hy would you launch a resolution that you cannot guarantee will pass” (1:37:07–1:37:08), might suggest that the initiative was flawed from the outset and that it was a mistake to attack a popular president of a successful farm. This would actually explain why the film was banned: the authorities did not want to expose the public to depictions of events that should never have taken place. If this was the case, Gazdag and Ember’s “offence” was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I believe the opposite is true, however, not only in the sense that they were in the right place at the right time, but also because their film was as much a gain to the power elite as it was a blow.

Widespread lawsuits against cooperative presidents were initiated a year after The Resolution was made, and these legal procedures, according to the research of Varga, followed from the narrative of the corrupted president, which translated into “subordination of public interests to group interest.”30 The film also rendered legible the alliance formed in the years of economic liberalization between presidents and members, a group interest hard to penetrate and break by party officials. To prove the immoral nature of this alliance, authorities chose to vilify and criminalize the activities of presidents who supposedly acted in the service of farm members and made them willing accomplices in illegal activities. Varga presents numerous archival documents criticizing allegedly corrupted group interests, and the anti-Ferenczi alliance, as I pointed out, makes similar claims on several occasions. The film probably guided the political elite to the recognition that presenting members as collaborators in economic and moral wrongdoing would give authorities the necessary public authorization to launch legal and ideological attacks and set off nationwide show-trials. Having given the concept shape and sown the seeds of broad-based anti-agricultural sentiments in the public sphere, the central administration handed over the task of “tracking down” individual presidents to lower-level functionaries with reliable knowledge of local affairs.

In my view, The Resolution was not banned because it documented the failure of the anti-president discourse, since eventually the campaign against the president of the cooperative succeeded. At the end of the film, captions inform viewers about the removal of József Ferenczi by the coop members in 1973, which was followed by disciplinary measures against his person. I also believe the film provided valuable information for the power elite about the shortcomings of paternalist administrative methods and discriminatory practices on the one hand and the desire of farm workers for depoliticized company management and autonomy in financial and economic decisions on the other. In a more general sense, the authorities would have understood the citizen’s increasing desire for individual opinion and the decoupling of the private sphere from politics. In addition to suggesting that the state-socialist regime was upheld by political and not social commitment, the film also showed how past practices of collectivizing private lives and subordinating them to politicized interests provoked people’s anti-political reflexes.

In this context, the behavior of the local party apparatchiks is likewise revealing. Although these men should embody the committed cadre type with full devotion to an ideology, they seem to be more fascinated by the camera, and they willingly act out roles. At the end of the final discussion, they look into the camera smiling. Estélyi strikes the table, imitating the sound of a clapperboard, and says, “Well…that’s all” (1:39:51). In the documentary feature films of the Balázs Béla Studio (BBS) and Társulás Stúdió the choice to cast amateur actors to play social types served the goal of authenticity. Including such scenes of self-performance in a documentary, in my understanding, serves the purpose of meta-commentary on public role playing as a survival method during the Kádár regime. These scenes propose that functionary identities are always performed and constructed through the acting out of idolized roles, ritualistic behavior types, and verbal clichés: politics becomes performance and performance legitimizes and authenticates politics. In other words, maintaining the “authentic” image of the committed cadre is depicted as the greatest service to the regime, since the regime is what people perceive of it in the public sphere. Esse est percipi. The Resolution draws a portrait of a political system which has lost its revolutionary momentum—even cadres and political activists are performed roles—and concentrates most of its energies on maintaining appearances, on constructing the image of integrity. Gazdag and Ember do not theorize the reasons for this lost momentum, but the lack of social support for the discriminatory discourse presented in the film is symptomatic and, I believe, corresponds with the following assertion by Gábor Gyányi: “modern political dictatorships in their founding stage rely on popular movements, but when they eventually solidify (consolidate) into state power they require more than (just) the support of political fanatics.”31 Unless this transition from activist-based to broad-based support is achieved, a legitimacy crisis of the political elite is imminent.

The lessons of The Resolution are manifold: it identifies a communal will for a depoliticized public sphere and, furthermore, describes politics as a stage on which appearances are maintained through authentic performances. The performative qualities of politics might have provided the regime with the illusion of authority over citizens, but they were too weak to ensure full control over them. Recognizing its own limited options to democratize the public sphere, the administration strove to politicize the private by injecting into it the performative qualities of anti-politics and allowing the sphere of intimacy to perform itself as a site of detachment and relative liberty. As such, the power elite opened the fairground of illusionary authenticity to the masses and invited them to act out imaginations of privacy. The political benefits of infantilizing society while regaining control over people who could not be effectively fanaticized were not only merely symptomatic of Goulash Communism, rather, they defined it.

Balaton Retro: Goulash Communism Debunked

Gábor Zsigmond Papp’s Balaton Retro (2007) uses exclusively archival footage which at the time it was made served the single aim of aggrandizing the achievements of the socialist welfare state. Like Budapest Retro 1–2 (1998 and 2003), his previous ventures into retro-documentaries, Balaton Retro also depended on the Hungarian Film Archive for historical resources. Papp would both recycle and re-contextualize archival material, adding popular songs from the period as musical accompaniment and voiceover commentaries to the images. In his grandiose visual montage of Goulash Communism, images that once pretended to be apolitical, carrying softened and disguised overtones of ideological discourses (and then after the regime change becoming material signifiers of a sociocultural elsewhere), are presented as a self-debasing narrative of the Kádár regime. Papp also emphasized this feature of the film:

 

[t]his is not a historical presentation of the Kádár regime, rather it reveals how the regime wanted people to see it. These are propaganda films that debunk themselves. One does not need to add anything, as they are absurd as they are. We never tried to mock anything with the voiceover commentaries, the humor of the films follow from the original footage.32

Apart from distinguishing history from retro-memory, Papp’s reference to the humor of the archival footage suggests that already at the time of their making the recordings were perceived as half serious representations of Lake Balaton, either because they capture comic scenes of holiday makers or because of their pathetic efforts to present ideological narratives as reality. Balaton Retro also subverts the historical sensation of nostalgia, an emotionally saturated sensibility to an ideal but lost past and, likewise, revival(ism), a group strategy to rediscover and reconnect with a past thought to be lost as a result of a sociocultural fracture. Although the film will be enjoyed by viewers yearning for commercial mass produced nostalgia and will allow the younger generation socialized in consumer society to grasp the atmosphere of socialist popular culture, Papp does not attempt to mythologize the era or present the social landscape of the 1960s and 1970s as exemplary or authentic and, thus, worth rejuvenating. The retro-memory employed by the film is not a “rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress,” neither does it wish to “obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time”.33 Rather, it is a self-conscious and ironic attitude to the narration of the past. The discursive strategy of Balaton Retro is closest to Guffey’s definition of retro as an unsentimental memory genre: “half-ironic, half-longing, ‘retro’ considers the recent past with an unsentimental nostalgia. It is unconcerned with the sanctity of tradition or reinforcing social values; indeed, it often insinuates a form of subversion while sidestepping historical accuracy.”34

Papp’s film points beyond the post-socialist culture of nostalgia, and while it does not turn its back on the increasing demand for retro, it refuses to glorify or mythologize the past. I agree with Sárközy’s assertion that Papp’s retro-documentaries follow from the Western-European and American tradition of revisionist history: “propaganda films recently made available by archives are reinterpreted and radically re-contextualized. Thus, they allow us to reconsider our ideas and beliefs about reality.” 35 I would add only that Papp’s revisionism is most productive when linked to the aforementioned paradoxes of the popular demand for privacy under state socialism. Balaton Retro, I contend, reaches beyond the deceptive mask of Goulash Communism, and instead of depicting it as the golden age of egalitarianism, it explores Lake Balaton as the discursive production of the myth of a depoliticized private sphere. Papp investigates the “authenticity” of the lake as a place of retreat, less a geographical location than a spatial metaphor of the much sought-after detachment from a non-egalitarian public life. Although stylistically very different, I consider the film the twin-narrative of The Resolution, a perceptive reading of how consecutive generations continued to find comfort in the lake even after realizing that their initial yearning for equality, privacy, and liberty was compromised, neutralized, and dissatisfied. I propose that Balaton Retro debunks the “authenticity” of Lake Balaton, and more generally the false emotional, economic, and political imaginations about Goulash Communism in a discourse with five layers.

The first layer considers tourism-related infrastructure, mainly housing facilities of very different quality and price. People who were not eligible for cheap trade-union owned resort homes (so-called SZOT üdülő) could choose between different types of accommodation, including hotels, motels, apartment houses, and campsites. This layer of the discourse links the emergence of the socialist welfare state to the modernization of local infrastructure, as a result of which Lake Balaton, also known as the Hungarian Riviera in popular terminology, was transformed into an affordable holiday destination for ordinary people, mainly families. This latter aspect explains why Balaton became a spatial symbol of egalitarianism and a source of shared experience for generations of Hungarians. Actually, its popularity soon exceeded its capacity, resulting in crowded beaches and overpriced catering services. As the planned economy could not provide proper or even basic services for all visitors, the authorities permitted the establishment of private enterprises to satisfy high demand. Lake Balaton, in this regard, exemplifies what economist János Kornai termed a shortage economy: a chronic Eastern European experience during the state socialist period.36 The consequent emergence of lucrative private businesses (apartment houses, takeout restaurants, greengrocers) soon became a characteristic feature of Lake Balaton and transformed popular imaginations of the place from a symbol of egalitarianism to a symbol of ruthless profiteering.

Along with active laborers, the communist youth was a key social resource with which to build future support for the regime. Not surprisingly, youth culture was given increased attention by the political elite, as evidenced quite clearly by the concern shown by propaganda films for the attitudes of this age group. This is reflected in Balaton Retro, the second discursive layer of which introduces student camps and youth oriented subculture around the lake. The pioneer’s camp at Zánka, referred to as a gift of the party to working class children and celebrated as another achievement of the welfare state, is presented in archival recordings as a place where the younger generations share the benefits of global communism and enjoy vacations in a multicultural environment. In Papp’s re-contextualization, however, it seems more an example of ideological indoctrination, when the voiceover narrator reads part of a letter written, allegedly, by children for the anniversary of the Hiroshima attacks: “[w]e enter our forces into a coalition to fight against the threat of nuclear catastrophe and to terminate wars around the world” (00:23:04–00:23:14). The strange wording of these sentences, very different from children’s language, points to the indoctrinating atmosphere of youth camps in the period, which hindered the development of critical, self-aware, and proactive social identities and laid the foundations of a politically infantile citizenry Another form of institutional recreation was organized by the Hungarian Young Communist League (KISZ) at camps around the lake, where teenagers would do (compulsory) voluntary work at agricultural farms or lend a hand at state-owned retailing units, such as supermarkets. Although this represented an ineffective form of labor, the film implies a calculated correspondence between the shortage economy and the rigid labor market which heavily relied on unpaid work. Moving on to the generational experiences of young adults, the film presents visual and verbal documents of the moral panic over young people’s attitudes. The discourse of vilification against subcultures presumed (for reasons unexplained) provocative and threatening to socialist morality is echoed by the voiceover commentary. Although this self-reflective imitation of the paternalist rhetoric becomes its own caricature, it exemplifies how vulnerable the space of liberty was, and it points to the eventual failure to find a refuge from everyday drudgery and non-egalitarian social relations

The next discursive layer of the film explores tourism and introduces Lake Balaton as an outpost of the West behind the Iron Curtain. Western tourists were allowed to spend holidays at Lake Balaton chiefly for economic reasons: to increase reserves of hard currency and thus facilitate commerce with Western companies. These considerations led to increased tourist interest in Lake Balaton, and this had an impact on the cultural image of the space. Either as sites of reunions for separated German families or as inexpensive yet well-equipped holiday resorts offering the best of Hungarian cuisine, Gypsy music, popular entertainment, and access to high art, the hotels and campsites popping up around the lake served as a space of connectivity. In addition to functioning as a contact zone between capitalist, consumer-oriented modernity and socialist modernity, which was proud of its revolutionary advancements in the field of social welfare, Lake Balaton also rendered legible the economic inequalities along the East-West divide. Unlike the international pioneer camp of Zánka, where a shared ideological background eliminated national differences and inequalities of wealth, spaces which were under less control, like streets and hotel parking lots, were sites of encounters of a different kind. As Balaton Retro’s archival footage shows, ordinary Hungarians would stare with amazement at signifiers of material wealth, like cars, trendy cloths, and accessories. Especially revealing are visual passages of young women throwing brief, enthusiastic glances at Western men, but the lack of access to premium leisure activities and spaces (like Hotel Marina) was a burden to most Hungarian holiday makers, and it added to their feelings of inferiority. The most vivid illustration of the imperfection of state-provided welfare is the scene entitled “A foreigner at Lake Balaton,” a mock film-diary of a Hungarian expatriate returning to Balaton for a vacation. The protagonist of this episode, who speaks Hungarian with a heavy accent and resembles characters in vintage recordings, is József Magyar. He visits his homeland and is astonished to find a modern tourist industry on the lakeside. A cloudy day, however, disrupts his routine water-sport activities and forces him to pursue other entertainment. He asks at the reception desk in his hotel whether it is possible to play roulette or billiards, but he is told that such dishonorable games are not available, and although they have a chess board, it has gone missing. Magyar decides to play tennis. After paying a hefty sum at the reception desk, he is told to pick up the key at the hospital, which he does with some reluctance, only to find that the tennis court is already taken. This comic parable is Papp’s most explicit attempt to interpret Goulash Communism as welfare provided by a paternalist state (epitomized by the hotel receptionist) bound by ideological imperatives (concerning what is dishonorable and what is not) and characterized by shortsighted and chaotic planning (as the case of the key suggests).

Kornai draws a similar picture: “[a] paternalist ‘welfare state’ covering the entire population was developed over several decades. Hungary can vie with the most developed Scandinavian countries in the range of codified entitlements to benefits and in the proportion of GDP laid out on social spending, whereas per capita production is only a small fraction of theirs.”37 At a later point, Kornai calls this redistributive system of welfare spending beyond the country’s economic capacity “premature,”38 and he contends that maintaining it “was most important to the government at any time to reassure people. The paternalist redistribution certainly has a soothing effect, compensating to a large extent for the reduction in and uncertainty about real wages earned legally in the market sector.”39 This characterization of the welfare state, the compensatory function of which often led to hasty and unreflective decisions, bears remarkable similarities with Papp’s witty parable of the tourist industry, which appears to work well, but in fact is illogical and, ultimately, dysfunctional. In this insightful segment, Balaton Retro points to the central paradox permeating all discursive layers that ascribe meanings to the lake. Like Goulash Communism, the popular image of Lake Balaton is fractured by the discrepancies between the ideal of egalitarianism and a non-egalitarian reality, the promise of retreat from the corruptness of public life and the frustration over the same demoralizing social relations being reproduced locally.

The iconic business figures (popular heroes for some, profiteers for others) associated with the lake were also the products of a regime lost in its own doublethink. While the authorities, at first, allowed private resources to ease the soaring demand for accommodation and licensed building permits for large family houses which everybody knew served in part as short-term rental properties, they later reprimanded owners for unlawful profiteering. This cat-and-mouse-game is recounted by Papp via an archival interview with a man who built a seven-bedroom house (with numbers hanging from the doorframes) with three bathrooms and two kitchens but claimed that it was for his family and the years he would spend in retirement. Because his narrative will be heard in the public sphere, the man adapts to the official language of egalitarianism presented, in this case literally, as the language of dishonesty. This is another example of the discursive production of privacy, an agency allowed to be formed in the act of being subordinated to and limited by the political rationale.

The same logic characterized Goulash Communism as a social system promising increased quality of life in a world with limited freedoms and consumer choice. The segment on sports around the lake offers an overview of the various forms of water and beach sports enjoyed by vacationers, noting that there were always shortages of the most popular equipment, such as air mattresses. According to the logic of the shortage economy, holiday makers were to blame, as they were demanding an unnecessary item. In the eyes of bureaucrats, the lake was there for swimming, rowing, and sailing, but not for sunbathing on mattresses. Another telling example of the short-sightedness, or in this case the sheer stupidity, of bureaucrats is when the local council advises fisherman to build their huts on the top of the hill because they make the lakeshore unattractive. Some water sports, like sailing and motor-boating, were regarded as too extravagant and damaging to social egalitarianism, so the owners were burdened with extra taxes and restrictions in the 1970s. The strict regulations on motorboat use offer a compelling case of how ideological and pragmatic considerations were seemingly reconciled. This episode of the film begins with a voiceover narration: “in 1978, authorities introduce a total ban on motorboats with the exception of those owners who agree to patrol the lake voluntarily in their free time” (01:01:45–01:02:00). Later, we see an archival interview with a policeman who lists professions, including doctors, professors, company directors, and engineers (people with high qualifications and an unquestionable sense of responsibility), as members of the voluntary water-police community. In the next shot, we hear a segment from an archival audio recording: “[n]owadays, many people criticize the quality of the Hungarian educational system. But can these critics show another country where voluntary policemen solve complicated mathematical formulas and carry out intricate surgical operations?” (01:02:44–01:03:00) The manner in which this information is presented not only offers a sketch of the logic underlying regulations and practices, it also offers a symptomatic reading of the strategies adopted by the regime to appease conflicts arising from economic inequalities. Accordingly, influential and high-income representatives of the professional and industrial elite could maintain their privileges in return for voluntary services provided for the community. The fact that the authorities wished to disguise cosmopolitan hobbies as public service, that is, disguise rather than resolve social inequalities, suggests that despite endless tirades about commitment to egalitarianism, the regime actually operated through clientelism, in-group bias, and a system of favors.

The last discursive layer of the film presents the richness of cheap amusements offered for vacationers, including for instance a beauty pageant, a hairdresser competition, a fashion show, a water theatre, fairgrounds, open-air cinemas, concerts, and festivals, most of which drew large crowds eager for spectacle. These activities, though they suggested affluence and consumer freedom, actually encouraged people to partake in the infantile social rites provided by state-controlled popular culture. Even more openly than in the previous archival footage, young female bodies dressed in bikinis are highlighted, as if narratives of Lake Balaton could be best told from the perspective of a sexualized patriarchal regime. The gendered gaze, as a prevalent feature of the recordings, coupled with regular mention of the easy-going sexual disposition of visitors, draws a picture of Lake Balaton as the bordello of Goulash Communism, a space of tolerated exhibitionism, a spatial safety-valve for otherwise bigoted, puritanical, and self-restraining state-socialist public morals. Serving as a showroom of Hungary’s evolving popular culture, municipalities around the lake were urged to promote cultural events with historical traditions. The Anna-ball in Tiszafüred and the grape harvest celebrations reinvented aristocratic and folk festive traditions for mass entertainment, adding socialist flavors to the events. Reinvention also brought about bureaucratization: a recording of the Anna-ball organizing committee shows easily recognizable party functionaries, like those of The Resolution, discussing details of a festival initiated in the Reform Era, a period of nineteenth-century Hungarian history that saw the awakening of national identity, modernization, and the spread of liberalism.

Conclusion

Balaton Retro evokes the material culture and social rituals of the Kádár era with an observant and elaborative memory which remains alert to the interplay of elements among the various narrative layers of Lake Balaton. Like Gazdag and Ember, Papp also recognizes the schizophrenic nature of the regime, which hopes to resolve its loss of popular support by adopting populist techniques with which to manipulate, neutralize, and infantilize the masses. The films discussed here arrive at the same conclusion as Gábor Halmai: “political legitimacy in Hungary depends on welfarist concessions to the population.”40 The economic rationale of these concessions was, in large part, unfounded and, as Kornai asserts, “did not derive from a forward-looking, long-term government program. It arose out of improvisation, through rivalry between distributive claims. First one group, stratum, or trade then another would demand more or at least struggle against curtailment of its existing rights.”41 It is impossible to run a system founded on improvisation of such a high degree without the collaboration of citizens, who willfully renounce their own interests for the benefit of others. This is, of course, an unrealistic scenario, and if pursued, it would further undermine the legitimacy of the administration and certainly lead to the spread of grassroots resistance and bottom-up populism. Another route, the one taken by the consolidated Kádár regime, was to disguise the improvised nature of policies aiming to raise living standards and pacify citizens’ anti-authoritarian attitudes by allowing them the (illusion of the) political passivity of private life, even if this passivity was used to legitimize the regime and made people unwilling collaborators in their own subordination.

The chosen documentaries portray this control as a paternalistic, top-down model of populism and a partial return to the rhetoric of early communist regimes, which proposed to empower disenfranchised people. The claims made by the party functionaries to protect social interests from egotistic group interests in The Resolution evoke the populist slogans communist activists proclaimed during their rise to power. Documenting the return to these techniques of mobilization, Gazdag and Ember offer empirical proof of how populism, as Francisco Panizza notes, “becomes a tradition embedded in the party’s myths, institutions and official discourse.”42 The populism Gazdag and Ember identify as a seminal strategy of the Kádár-regime also calls to mind Ernesto Laclau’s proposition, according to which “a movement is not populist because in its politics or ideology it presents actual contents identifiable as populistic, but because it shows a particular logic of articulation of those contents – whatever those contents are” (emphasis in original).43 The practice of mobilizing “the people” against imagined “others” was a feature of state-socialist administrative practices, and it revealed strategies of populism in two interrelated aspects. On the one hand, the discursive production of antagonisms (people vs. others, Us vs. Them) requires, as Laclau asserts, “floating signifiers”44 that can take different concrete referents in different circumstances. As suggested above, the intimidation strategies used against Ferenczi involved the constant redefinition and specification of what “corrupt” (as a floating signifier) meant. The same applies to the “people” and the “will of the community.” My analysis of The Resolution has sought to how the regime was struggling to construct the authentic meanings of these categories and in the process revealed its own inauthenticity and legitimacy crisis. Part of this was the unfounded identification of agricultural workers as belonging to the imaginary union of the people (the Us). In fact, the film bears witness to the formation of a bottom-up populist movement stemming from people’s demand for privacy and their desire to retreat from a politicized public life.

This desire is connected to the second aspect of the populism which, according to Panizza, “both depoliticises and hyper-politicises social relations”45 to increase support. De-politicization and the substitution of the “political discourse for the discourse of morals” 46 was a key aspect in the character assassination of Ferenczi and the appeals made to the workers’ sense of ethical responsibility for social interests. The discursive production of Lake Balaton exemplifies how de-politicization may serve as a disguise for hyper-politicization. The archival footage featured in Balaton retro mobilized popular culture to prove that universal access to welfare benefits, leisure and sport activities, participation in festivals, and other common social rituals was falsely perceived as a form of resistance more authentic than open political confrontation. Papp recognizes the paradoxical nature of such authenticity, and he elucidates how propaganda was expected to convince people that the lake was not an artificial space of emancipation, not a patronized escape, and not the site of illusionary retreat when, in fact, it was. Identifying de-politicization as an effect and a form of camouflage of hyper-politicization allows Papp to describe welfarism as populist. Whenever people demanded more and the disguise was exposed, strategies of hyper-politicization would emerge either by posing bureaucratic limits on people’s desires or by forcing them into hegemonic relations. Whenever the moral authority of the welfare state was questioned, like in encounters with more affluent Western lifestyles, propaganda returned to antagonizing dichotomies (Us vs. Them) or, as reports on pioneer camps testify, emphasized the unequal relationship between the people and their patron, the state.

One of my intentions in this article is to have drawn further critical attention to the consolidated Kádár regime as a case of political populism best understood through the widespread social desire to retreat into the private sphere and the private fantasies of an apolitical elsewhere. Present-day populism, as the politics of the disillusioned and nostalgic masses, is similar. It openly critiques the Establishment and continuity, and it petitions for new economic models, social dynamics, and cultural idols. It gains popularity by recognizing people’s anti-political sentiments, allowing such imaginations to enter the realm of politics, and spearheading the outrage against a presumably corrupted elite. Emerging in Eastern Europe, it has recently swept through the West, eroding the status quo of modern democracy and bringing its institutions to their knees. More precisely, it emerged from the Eastern European experience of disillusionment shared by ever-extending segments of the population increasingly vulnerable to the neoliberal economic transformation. The rude awakening from global capitalism increased, as post-socialist nostalgia testifies, citizens’ fascination with the previous regime and prevented them from recognizing that the switch to a market economy was only the catalyst and not the cause of their destitution, that, in fact, societies suffer from the legacy of the very unsustainable socioeconomic models they once passively helped to engineer.

If we accept the assertion that the Kádár regime’s Goulash Communism failed because its weak economic performance, which was unable to support welfare policies and further the process of social liberalization, prompted desires too robust for its narrow ideological framework to hold back (in other words, it was unable to satisfy people’s demands for more welfare), we can make further claims about the recent upsurge in political populism. First, it places people’s expectations and desires above political rationality, but since these expectations are mostly unfounded and derive from the childish belief in the benefits of political inactivity, populism has to maintain society’s dishonest relationship with the past. Secondly, in its support for unreflective, restorative nostalgia and antagonism towards the self-critical reassessment of the state-socialist heritage, populism shelters people’s right to cherish an otherwise false sense of reality. Not only does it accept this new license to dishonesty and promote the freedom of an infantile citizenry, it also obtains political legitimacy as its guardian. Hence, populism eventually translates the private ideology of passive resistance into political action, but only in order to use anti-political subjectivity for its own unpredictable and “authentic” ends.

 

Bibliography

A Határozat [The Resolution]. Dir. Gyula Gazdag–Ember Judit. BBS–MAFILM Objektív Filmstúdió, 1972.

Balaton Retró [Balaton Retro]. Dir. Zsigmond Papp Gábor. Budapest Film, 2007.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001

Esterházy, Péter. “Frankfurti könyvvásár 2004 – Esterházy Péter béke díja” [Frankfurt Book Fair 2004 – Péter Esterházy’s Peace Prize]. Élet és Irodalom [Life and literature] 48, no. 42 (2004). Accessed July 14, 3017. http://www.es.hu/cikk/2004-10-18/esterhazy-peter/frankfurti-konyvvasar-2004-esterhazy-peter-beke-dija.html.

Guffey, Elizabeth E. Retro: The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

Gyáni Gábor. “Kollaboráció és a hatalom titka” [Collaboration and the secret of power]. In Az ügynök arcai [The faces of the agent], edited by Sándor Horváth, 41–52. Budapest: Libri, 2014.

Győri, Zsolt, and György Kalmár, eds. Tér, hatalom és identitás viszonyai a magyar filmben. Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetemi Kiadó, 2015.

Halmai, Gábor. “(Dis)possessed by the Spectre of Socialism: Nationalist Mobilization in ‘Transitional’ Hungary.” In Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe, edited by Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai, 113–141. New York–Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011.

Hammer, Ferenc. “A megismerés szerkezetei, stratégiái és poétikái: szocio-doku a BBS-ben” [The structures, strategies, and poetics of recognition: Socio-documentary in BBS]. In BBG 50: A Balázs Béla Stúdió 50 éve [50 years of the Balázs Béla Studio], edited by Gelencsér Gábor, 263–74. Budapest: Műcsarnok/BBS, 2009.

K. Horváth, Zsolt: “A valóság metapolitikája. Kognitív realizmus a magyar társadalomkutatásban: szociográfia és dokumentumfilm” [The meta-politics of reality. Cognitive realism in Hungarian social research: Sociography and documentary film]. In BBG 50: A Balázs Béla Stúdió 50 éve [50 Years of the Balázs Béla Studio], edited by Gelencsér Gábor, 275–86. Budapest: Műcsarnok/BBS, 2009.

Kornai, János. “Paying the Bill for Goulash Communism: Hungarian Development and Macro Stabilization in a Political-Economy Perspective.” Social Research 63, no. 4 (1996): 943–1040.

Kornai, János. Economics of Shortage. Amsterdam: North Holland Press, 1980.

Laclau, Ernestio. “Populism: What’s in a Name?” In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, edited by Francisco Panizza, 32–49. London–New York: Verso, 2005.

N.a. “A társadalmi folyamatok láthatóvá tétele: Beszélgetés a Balázs Béla Stúdió vezetőségével” [Making social processes visible: Conversation with the leadership of the Balázs Béla Studio]. Filmkultúra 12, no. 5 (1971): 21–24.

Nadkarni, Maya. “‘But it’s ours’: Nostalgia and the Politics of Authenticity in Post-Socialist Hungary.” In Post-Communist Nostalgia, edited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, 190–214. NewYork–Oxford: Berghahn, 2010.

Panizza, Francisco. “Introduction: Populism and the Mirror of Democracy.” In Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, edited by Francisco Panizza, 1–31. London–New York: Verso, 2005.

Pomogáts, Béla. “1956 (eltékozolt) erkölcsi öröksége” [The (wasted) ethical legacy of 1956]. Látó 17, no. 10 (2006): 50–57.

Pünkösti, Árpád. Kiválasztottak [The chosen]. Budapest: Árkádia, 1988.

Sárközy, Réka. Elbeszélt múltjaink: A magyar történelmi dokumentumfilm útja [Our narrated pasts: The paths of Hungarian historical documentaries]. Budapest: 1956-os Intézet/L’Harmattan, 2011.

Sipos, Júlia. “Budapest retró: beszélgetés Papp Gábor Zsigmonddal” [Budapest retro: Conversation with Gábor Zsigmond Papp]. Filmvilág 56, no. 11 (2013): 46–47.

Szabó, Elemér. “‘Körül voltam én véve rendesen [...], ha nincs a film, akkor engem biztos, hogy börtönbe zárnak’: Interjú Ferenczi József egykori tsz-elnökkel, A határozat című dokumentumfilm kulcsszereplőjével” [ʻI was completely surrounded […], were it not for that film they surely would have put me in prison’: Interview with former farm president József Ferenczi, key character of the documentary The Resolution]. Korall 65 (2016): 1–16.

Tarr, Béla. “Beszélgetés Ember Judittal” [Conversation with Judit Ember]. In Beszélgetések a dokumentumfilmről [Conversations on documentary film], edited by György Durst et al., 72–79. Budapest: Népművelési Propaganda Iroda, 1981.

Valuch, Tibor. “A Cultural and Social History of Hungary 1948–1990.” In A Cultural History of Hungary: in the Nineteenth and Twntieth Centuries, edited by László Kósa, 249–349. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 1998.

Varga, Zsuzsa. “Miért bűn a sikeresség? Termelőszövetkezeti vezetők a vádlottak padján az 1970-es években” [Why is success a crime? Agricultural cooperative leaders on the accused bench in the 1970s]. Történelmi Szemle 54, no. 4 (2012): 599–621.

Erasing, Rewriting, and Propaganda in the Hungarian Sports Films of the 1950s*

Péter Fodor

University of Debrecen

In the years following World War II, the radical structural transformation of Hungarian society and the establishment of the communist dictatorship affected the functioning of sports as a social subsystem. At the time, the Hungarian public still remembered the sporting successes of the Horthy era (the Berlin Olympics, the 1938 FIFA World Cup) from the previous decade. Thus, the Sovietization of sports as a social subsystem had two intertwining goals in Hungary: in addition to creating a new institutional framework for sports, the regime also had to ensure good results, which were regarded as a matter of prestige. Like the daily press, the schematic film productions of the era were also characterized by the ideological utilization of sports. A typical example of the schematic style was Civil a pályán [Try and Win, 1951] by Márton Keleti, which used classical comedy elements to bring together the world of the factory and the world of the soccer field. Keleti’s film was intended to popularize a centralized mass sports movement of Soviet origins called “Ready to work and fight” and to communicate the party’s message to professional sportsmen who were considering emigration. The two versions of Csodacsatár [The Football Star, 1956 and 1957], also by Keleti, reveal a lot about the changes that the role of sports in state propaganda and political image construction underwent after the loss to West Germany in the 1954 FIFA World Cup Final and then after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. My paper seeks to interpret these films within the context of the era’s political and sports history.

Keywords: films and Communism, sports and Communism, football, soccer, Ferenc Puskás, the Golden Team

Introduction

Péter Esterházy, who played an active role in forming the literary memory of the communist dictatorship in Hungary, suggests in one of his texts which was published in a symbolic moment (Christmas 1989) that the relationship between the social-political climate of an age and its sports achievements cannot be understood as the product of a simple causal connection:

The relationships between society and soccer are nevertheless enigmatic. A lot of books have been published in Hungary in the last few years which draw parallels between the anomalies in soccer and society, and rightfully so. Why would soccer be good if the setting is corrupt, if sports cannot function cleanly, because this function is always tainted with extraneous considerations, that is, political aspects. Yes. Still, the greatest Hungarian team of all time, which was a team formed of players who retained their individuality, a team which had not only spirit and elegance, but power, which brought reforms to the whole soccer scene of the age, this team was born under a total dictatorship.1

 

Today, when the memory of the Hungarian national team, the “Golden Team,” which was active in the first half of the 1950s, is retained in the names of stadiums, public statues, tombs in Saint Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest, documentaries and movies, monographs and research essays, Esterházy’s lines do not seem unusual. Yet in the year of the regime change in Hungary, Esterházy’s approach was not at all self-evident, even if the late Kádár system, in a gesture of opening to the West, invited Ferenc Puskás home, and thus rehabilitated the name of the national team’s captain, who earlier had been regarded as a traitor by the regime. However, the Hungarian sports daily newspaper never reported on how Puskás went onto the field and scored goals in the old timers’ match celebrating his return in 1981 in People’s Stadium (People’s Stadium or “Népstadion,” which was opened in August 1953, was renamed Puskás Ferenc Stadium in 2002 and today is under demolition to make room for a more modern stadium). This highlights the politics of silence around his figure. The contrapuntal narrative of Esterházy’s text in 1989 foreshadowed a phenomenon still observable today, namely that the memory of the 1950s in post-transition Hungarian society is mostly negative, with one notable exception: sports. Memories of the regime and of sports have not only grown separate from each other, but they have come to constitute two opposing poles: in the negative memory of the Rákosi regime, sports (especially soccer) is the only constituent that conjures up positive associations. Today, only works related to the history of sports remind us that the “Golden Team” was at least in part an instrument of the Rákosi regime, which sought to profit from the team’s victories and prowess on the field in order to legitimize the regime’s hold on political power. The fact that it was part of the regime’s political image has faded in people’s memories of the national team. In the “imagination” of a significant part of Hungarian society, the players, and especially Ferenc Puskás, the team’s captain, remain distinctive folk heroes who managed to keep their personal autonomy while exploiting—not submitting to—the opportunities offered by the system.

Through an analysis of the film Try and Win [Civil a pályán], my essay examines how Hungarian movie culture in the first half of the 1950s retuned the meanings associated with sports. Subsequently, I will focus on the film The Football Star [A Csodacsatár]2 to demonstrate how this tradition was discontinued after the revolution of 1956.

The Film of Nationalized Sports: Try and Win

The Recent History of Sports Institutions

The structure of Hungarian society changed radically following World War II, and the establishment of the Communist dictatorship did not leave the sub-system of sports untouched. The last significant national competitions preceding the war brought major successes for Hungarian athletes. In the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Hungary came in third in the number of medals won behind the host, Germany, and the United States. In the soccer championship in France in 1938, the Hungarian national team made it to the finals. These successes of the Horthy era were remembered by the public a decade later. The Sovietization of sports required the establishment of a new institutional framework for organized physical training that would ensure that Hungarian athletes could continue to secure important achievements, which would mean prestige and hence a degree of legitimacy for the political system.

Change in the institutional framework of Hungarian competitive sports had started long before the Communists took power. The rise of state intervention in the late 1930s reshaped the image of sports, which until then had been largely a grassroots, civic movement since the turn of the century. In the last decade of the Horthy regime, politics was increasingly involved in competitive sports events. Between 1939 and 1944, the Jewish Laws were applied to sports organizations, and Jews were banned from participating in Hungarian sports. First, Jews were prohibited from leading sports organizations and associations. Later, teams with Jewish owners were abolished. In 1942, Jews were prohibited from playing sports, and after the German occupation, they could not even attend sports events as spectators. State intervention also affected workers’ sports associations. For example, “Vasas,” or the “iron” sports club, which was founded in 1911 by the Hungarian Union of Iron Workers as the “Vas- és Fémmunkások Sport Clubja,” [Sports Club of Iron and Metal Workers] was compelled to change its name and its colors in 1944. State intervention also changed the economic foundations of sports: professionalism, which was introduced into Hungarian soccer in 1926, was eliminated on 1 January 1945.3

After the end of the war, Hungarian sports revived quickly, which was due in part to the fact that the competing political parties were striving to gain influence over the management of various clubs and the new sports institutions. The Independent Smallholders Party, the Social Democrats, and the Communists were especially active in this respect. The influence of politics on sports did not disappear after the fall of the Horthy regime. Professionalism was not reintroduced, and the athletes all had “civilian” jobs. The players of the Újpest TE soccer team, which was supported by the Independent Smallholders Party and which won 3 championships between 1945 and 1947, included industrial workers, officials, and various kinds of entrepreneurs (tradesmen, caterers).4

 

Mass Sports and Competitive Sports Tailored to the Soviet Model

When director Márton Keleti started making the film Try and Win5 in 1951, the Sovietization of Hungarian competitive sports had already been completed.6 Cinematic support for this process was not an important item on the filmmakers’ political agenda. Rather, they were focused on making a movie that would help popularize the mass sports movement that had been imported from the Soviet Union. The finished work bridged the gap between the spheres of the workplace and competitive sports, and it presented an image of nationalized sports which conformed to the official sports politics of the times. It also contained concrete messages for sportsmen who could not imagine their future prospects in the newly Sovietized sports system.

In order to understand the term “civilian” in the original Hungarian title, one must know the lyrics to the title song of the movie.7 The song draws a parallel between (Stakhanovite) labor competition in the sphere of production (industry and agriculture) and competitive sports. The plot of the film unpacks these parallels in more detail. The teams of workers are aspiring to secure victory in the Stakhanovite movement and on the sports field. However, competition is not the objective; it is merely a tool with which to strengthen the community and ensure social integration. Mass sports are portrayed in the film as a vehicle which helps people to become better workers.

Hungarian society became familiar with the slogan “Ready to Work, Ready to Fight” (“Munkára, harcra kész” or MHK in Hungarian) in 1949, when companies (factories, kolkhozes, enterprises) were compelled to organize mass sports activities based on the Soviet model. The program introduced in 1931 by the Komsomol in the Soviet Union played a central role in Soviet athletic culture, which attempted to increase workers’ production output (the modernization of production required a new worker’s body) and their military skills, hygienic awareness, and ideological commitment.8 The program was not set up to train athletes in certain sports, but rather to improve the overall physical condition of the population. The guiding principle was mass involvement, and the concrete goals were broken down by age groups. The socio-political function of sports was to channel the energies of new generations growing up in an urbanized environment into the praxis of healthy pastimes.9

Centrally organized physical education and pre-military training and a system which joined physical training with the workplace existed in Hungary under the Horthy regime, too. In 1921, Statute LIII on physical education created the basis for the “levente” associations (a paramilitary youth organization), and it obliged factories and enterprises with more than 1,000 workers to create the necessary infrastructure for their employees’ physical education. Similarly, the primary aim of the program taken from the Soviet Union at the end of the 1940s was “to engage the masses of workers and peasants who had never done sports before. The movement was extended to schools, offices, and the armed forces. The MHK-movement was expected to discover sports talents as well.”10 Trade unions were given the task of leading the initiative, but this did not always go smoothly. The promotion campaign was introduced with Socialist Realist posters, and it culminated in Márton Keleti’s film (the film features one of these posters), but the movie also reflects on the various difficulties encountered by the MHK-movement in the campaign in 1950.11

The scene following the title and the title song is dramaturgically unexpected, as it stages a soccer match being played in front of crowded stands. A radio broadcast is covering the event, and the stake is to take two points in the championship.12 These circumstances indicate that the game is a first division soccer match, not some mass sports event. The credits inform the viewer that the soccer team Red Truck is playing against the “Dózsa team.” This refers to a typical phenomenon of Sovietization: institutional transformations were always accompanied by the rhetorical act of naming/renaming. (It is a peculiar connection between right and left wing sports politics that in 1944, Vasas, a club which was associated with the left wing, was compelled to use the name “Kinizsi,” whereas in 1951, this name was given to Ferencváros, which was regarded as a team with right-wing sympathies and fans. The name is a reference to Pál Kinizsi, a general who served under Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus. Kinizsi constituted a suitable heroic figure of Hungarian history for the communist regime in part because he allegedly had been the simple son of a miller.) The Újpest Athletic Association was founded in 1885. It was funded by local, mostly Jewish factory owners during the interwar period, and the athletes were quite successful. The club was brought under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1950, and the reference to the district disappeared from the name: the team became Budapest Dózsa. (In the countries of the Eastern Bloc, the police teams usually featured the word “Dinamo” in their names, so the similarity of the initials also motivated the naming.) Thus, in the movie the actual players of a newly renamed ministry team (“Dózsa”) act as the members of a fictional factory team (Red Truck). In the opening scene they are playing a final with a trade union team, the Óbuda Vasas. The film thus reflects the ambition to sever the traditional social roots of major sports clubs by placing them under the lead of trade unions and ministries (they were nationalized).13 This social program is in unison with the characterizations in the film. Specifically, we know nothing of the socio-cultural backgrounds of the characters. They all appear uniformly similar; the only features that make them unique are their flaws, which are not traced back to social factors and which, in the case of the protagonists, are easily overcome. Nobody in the film seems to be a “civilian”: neither the first division soccer players nor the workers stumbling on the athletic field have any kind of private, civilian lives that are unrelated to the workplace. The spaces of private life are almost completely missing. There is only one short scene that takes place in a flat, among family members, but one of the family members is just about to leave for work. The background is usually a factory or the sports pitch belonging to the factory. The characters have no free time: they go to the pitch to play sports, to play on the factory team, or to support their team. The vacation at Lake Balaton is no exception. It is also organized by the factory, so it is no surprise that the female protagonist (Marika Teleki) appears in the sports uniform of the Silk Factory of Újpest. Even though Try and Win stages the first steps in the romance between Teleki and Pista Rácz, the lovers only meet as private individuals once, and even then they are not alone. Moreover, when they talk about their feelings, they never forget that they represent a workplace community. Keeping distance from the community is represented in the film in an explicitly negative light. It is linked to conspiracy and (high) treason: when the forward of the Red Truck team, Jóska Teleki, is not with the team, he is conspiring with the enemy, and his absence from work hinders the Stakhanovite work of the group.

Even the very few leftist clubs that functioned successfully during the Horthy regime could not avoid the restructuring that came with Sovietization. In the first half of the twentieth century, organizations that promoted “cultured” and “meaningful” pastimes became more and more significant in Hungarian workers’ culture. Of these organizations, the Workers’ Physical Training Association (MTE) was the most prestigious. It was founded in 1906 and had among its members sportsmen who participated in Olympic Games and won medals in World and European Championships. Ferenc Pataki, who won a gold medal at the 1948 London Olympics, was a member of this association, and he played himself in the film. He supervised the sports festival in which the Budapest Red Meteor, the Honvéd, and the Építők teams performed gymnastic exercises. MTE was merged into Meteor in 1950, while Honvéd and Építők were new sports associations modeled on Soviet examples. Honvéd was overtaken by the army, while Építők represented the trade union of construction industry workers. In addition to Pataki, five other athletes are mentioned:14 Ferenc Várkői, Ágnes Keleti, Tamás Homonnai, Olga Gyarmati, and László Papp. Several factors, in addition to the prominence of these individuals as accomplished athletes whose names were familiar to the pubic, contributed to their selection as characters in the film. For instance, they all did outdoor sports that could easily be filmed: gymnastics, athletics and boxing. But one aspect stands out: all six of them were successful after World War II. Their achievements mentioned in the film were related to the 1948 Olympic Games, so their characters did not evoke the sports successes of the Horthy regime.15

The changed institutional framework of sports is highlighted by the sentence at the end of the title: “The sports scenes in this film were made with the direction and help of OTSB.” OTSB stood for the National Physical Education and Sports Committee, which was founded at the beginning of 1951. It became the most important organization in Hungarian sports. The success of the film helped the new committee earn legitimacy. We cannot be sure exactly why (perhaps in exchange for support) the protagonist of the film, Rácz, who becomes a successful mass sports functionary at the end of the film, performs the same job in the truck factory as Gyula Hegyi. Hegyi earned his living during the 1920s in the Renault factory as an iron turner. He became one of the most influential leaders in Hungarian sports after 1945 until his death in 1978, and he was acting president of the OTSB when the film was made. The armed forces also had a significant role in Sovietized sports. In addition to the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the ÁVH (State Protection Authority) served as an institutional basis for competitive sports, and between 1948 and 1953 Minister of Defense Mihály Farkas had considerable influence over sports life, too. The prominent role of the military in sports explains why Feri Dunai, who went from being an iron worker to becoming a captain and who was played by János Görbe in the film (who wears a uniform throughout the film) is the most knowledgeable when it comes to how workers’ sports lives should be organized. His character closely follows the example of the “father” figure familiar from Soviet Socialist Realist (literary and cinematic) narratives:16 as the representative of the communist party he is the only character in Try and Win who has a thorough knowledge of the vision of an ideal society, thus only he can be an advisor and mentor to the symbolic “son” (Rácz).17 His first appearance in the movie follows the example of the leading technique of the age: he gives an uplifting speech in front of portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Rákosi. He does not need to refer to his superiors, the representational context does that for him, and the viewer does not doubt for a single moment that what he says is right and needs to be accepted without question.18 The dialogues between Dunai and Rácz constitute a kind of reconciliation and merging of the two spheres of sports and the military, which were equally important for the communist party. The world champion Dunai argues for the importance of sports successes in promoting a positive image of the country, but he warns Rácz that his mistakes in the footrace do not make him a good soldier. This harmonizes with the vision of the communist party: “the leaders of the country emphasized the importance of physical education and sports from a military perspective,” and they tried to use “the propaganda power of sports successes in an international and domestic context.”19 Dunai also stands beside Rácz when the protagonist is enlightened and decides that he will revise his view on the social usefulness of sports and subsequently becomes the proponent of mass sports. Rácz’s conformist turn of heart also involves rational and emotional moments: the sports celebration at Balaton evokes certain scenes in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympics, which recorded the aesthetics of the moving body with such paradigmatic power. Keleti went beyond this in a certain sense: Riefenstahl photographed the naked body without any erotic appeal, emphasizing its embeddedness in nature, while Try and Win stages Marika Teleki walking among her fellow sportsmen and sportwomen as the object of Rácz’s desire. While the scene with all the red flags and the MHK marching song can be interpreted primarily through the codes of military processions, it also gives way to a touch of the erotic. The silk factory worker Marika Teleki is a lot more than a woman whose attention needs to be won by the protagonist. She embodies the ideal member of the MHK-movement, who is not a world class athlete, but is skilled in many sports (running, sailing, and volleyball). The film portrays a sports system where the boundaries of competitive sports and mass sports are blurred. The sports celebration at Balaton unites the two spheres, as evidenced by the greeting spoken on the loudspeaker: “We cordially greet […] our Olympic, European, and college world champions, the MHK-sportsmen of the factories and the workers sitting in the stands”. The MHK-exercises are led by Ferenc Pataki, and Marika is marching among Olympic champions.

 

Changes in the Official Image of the Sportsman

The communist turn in Hungary also meant that the status of the competitive sportsmen needed to be “addressed.” While in Hungary the status of the professional athlete existed since 1926 at least in soccer, the Soviet Union did not allow athletes to compete as professionals. Soviet sports politics was critical of the British model of elitist amateurism on the one hand, i.e. the tradition according to which aristocratic gentlemen needed no revenues from sports. This was why the Soviet Union did not take part in the Olympic movement until the middle of the century. On the other hand, the Soviet Union also criticized the profit-oriented, businesslike environment in which soccer had come to flourish in England since 1885. In the 1930s, a semi-amateur system was introduced in the Soviet Union. The sportsmen had workplaces (they could be factory or kolkhoz workers, employees, Red Army soldiers, or even university students), and they received remuneration for playing sports. However, sports organizations and clubs were not business enterprises.20 This system did not change much after World War II, when the politicians in the Soviet Union decided to turn the country into a sports superpower which would compete at the most prestigious international events. (The Soviet Union first entered the Summer Olympics in 1952 and the Winter Olympics in 1956). A similar semi-amateur system evolved in Hungary before 1926, but the communists decided to abandon this model and replace it with the Soviet one. Try and Win promoted the system of centrally organized physical education among non-sporting social groups. At the same time, it fleshed out the new image of the competitive sportsmen: these sportsmen were civilians on the field, and they had civilian workplaces. The soccer players of the Red Truck club, which competes in the premier league, were factory workers themselves. Pista Rácz is nominated to serve as the factory’s sports representative by none other than the soccer player played by Géza Henni, the first division goalkeeper who was moved from the Ferencváros team to Dózsa.21 The replacement of the sports representative in the film was also indicative of how the communist party invaded the management of the clubs in 1948/49. The portrayal of this process in the film is essentially the exact opposite of what had actually happened: the new representatives arrive not to enforce political power, but to respond to the requests of the sports sphere. The film’s first conflict is resolved by Rácz’s enlightenment, but the second conflict owes much to the fact that in the world on the screen there was a sport in which the harmony between competitive and mass sports is not total: soccer. It would be an exaggeration to claim that the makers of the film tried to stage this as a systemic problem, but the choice of soccer could not have been accidental.

 

Soccer in the Cross-Hairs

The prominent role of soccer in the film could be explained in many ways: beginning at the turn of the century, soccer was the most popular sport, and it attracted the largest numbers of spectators. Professionalism and a business-mentality emerged most prominently in this sport: players and coaches were well-paid, they received remuneration for playing matches abroad, and players were bought and sold. Towards the end of the 1930s, the radical right wing started to consider soccer a Jewish business, so they tried to sabotage it in various ways. Still, the heritage of this system was tangible after the war, as most of the players and trainers had been socialized in it. However, official professionalism was never introduced again. The deep structural changes that occurred after the communist takeover affected this sport the most: teams were renamed and their identities were altered arbitrarily (e.g. changes in team colors). The destruction and the building of teams was met with considerable antipathy by the public, especially among Ferencváros fans, who were considered “enemies” of the system. The international connections and the professional networks that had been developed in the interwar years were also destroyed after 1945. As Szegedi has observed, “before 1945, more than five hundred Hungarian soccer players and trainers played for and worked on European teams, and they used their knowledge and experience to develop these national teams (many of them are now dominating the pitches!).”22 Many players emigrated to the West after the war: several members of the national team that won the silver medal in 1938 left the country before 1948, including Gyula Zsengellér and Dr. György Sárosi. After the Western border had been closed, the players could only leave Hungary illegally. László Kubala, for example, was successfully smuggled out of the country in 1949 (he later became a legendary player for FC Barcelona), but the same year the ÁVH thwarted the defection of 20 other players (including the goalkeeper of the national team, Gyula Grosics).

This sketch of the historical background helps us understand why the world of soccer was the ideal backdrop against which the image of the enemy working for the capitalist West with the aim of subverting the Communist system could be staged. The tragic actuality and the menacing message of the movie also need to be highlighted. Márton Keleti’s team started shooting the film on 28 June 1951, three weeks after Sándor Szűcs, the defender of Újpest, who played for the national team on 19 occasions, was executed. Together with his girlfriend, the singer Erzsi Kovács, Szűcs tried to emigrate to the West in order to escape political harassment, but the ÁVH lured them into a trap. It was believed that he had an offer from Italy. It tells a lot about the nature of the Rákosi regime that Ferenc Szusza, a former teammate of Szűcs, played the part of a player in Try and Win who was also invited to Italy. Szűcs actually sent Szusza a message from death row asking his friend to try to convince the authorities to grant him a reprieve. While Szusza tried to help, he could do nothing to change the verdict. Márton Keleti’s film, by evoking the fate Sándor Szűcs in the scene in which the organizers of defection are arrested, sent a clear message to all sportsmen highlighting the dangers of embarking down the forbidden path.

 

The Heterogeneity of Cinematic Tradition

In addition to references to real events, Try and Win was also linked to the cinematic traditions of the time. It is quite telling about the situation of cinema in Hungary that it was the 46-year old Márton Keleti, who began his career under the Horthy regime, who directed a film which was a propagandistic portrayal of the change of elites implemented by the communist takeover. Pista Rácz is the prime example of the kind of social mobility, which was triggered by workplace achievements and loyalty to the system, rather than expertise, the significance of which was diminished.23 However, the fact that after 1949 Keleti changed his techniques of representation, as well as the ideological characteristics of his movies, did not mean that he discarded traditional frames of representation.24 Try and Win employs the clichés of production and sabotage films in its representations of the two protagonists (Rácz and Jóska Teleki), but it combines these techniques with features adopted from romantic comedies and operettas. Both the director of and the actors in Try and Win who had become famous under the Horthy regime (Kálmán Latabár, Gyula Gózon) were familiar with these genres, and the scriptwriters (István Békeffi, Károly Nóti) were also representatives of the interwar tradition of Hungarian film comedies. Latabár reenacted the stock characters he had played before the war: he played the loud-mouthed but clumsy figure in Love of Sports (1936). In this amalgam of Socialist Realist and pre-war genres, the traces of the past are not erased, but they represent a world completely different from the one before. One can even spot how the unintentional effect of Rácz’s infantile naivety (portrayed by actor Imre Soós, who only recites dry and lifeless sentences) is juxtaposed with Latabár’s more natural figure (Karikás), who, although he is cartoonish, has a more subtle understanding of interpersonal relationships.25 The songs certainly contributed to the popularity of the film, yet they end up being metafictional mechanisms that emphasize the inauthenticity of the representational strategies and the fictional quality of the story. In the middle of the film, there is a scene in which Karikás and three of his colleagues want to entertain the other factory workers, but the act goes awry. The workers laugh at the four singers, who stand in front of the MHK-emblem and slogan, and as the excessive laughter does not fit the ridiculousness of the situation, the MHK, which tries to make sportsmen out of workers, itself becomes the object of laughter. These kinds of scenes unintentionally subverted the overtly propagandistic content of the film.

The use of features of romantic comedies in the film mellowed the Manichean, bipolar world of the Socialist Realist sabotage-movies: we do not see two antagonistic groups (good vs evil) described in similar detail and in a mirror-like fashion.26 The juxtaposition of MHK and competitive sports is only applied in the case of one character, the manager of the Red Truck soccer team. However, Bogdán, who hopes to profit from the center forward’s illegal Western contract, is not the enemy of MHK. He is a “retrograde” representative of the business mentality of professional soccer that the post-1948 nationalization and centralization meant to erase. The communist party also eliminated the financial foundations of this mentality by sacking the bourgeois sponsors who financially supported the previous system. The agent who cooperates with Bogdán utters the key sentence in the film: “Sports is no longer business in this country.” This utterance is all the more significant as this is the only verbal reference to the fact that there had been an earlier period of sports history before the one that we see on screen: the film otherwise makes no mention of or reference to Hungarian sports traditions before 1948. Although the film’s generic structure and the performances of some of the actors emphatically evoke the heritage of cinematic traditions of the Horthy regime, there are hardly any references to the pre-war period. The filmmakers made sure that this intention found expression in a spatial sense as well. It comes as no surprise that the most important architectural project of the Rákosi regime, People’s Stadium, was also used in the film, and the narrative emphasizes the novelty and monumentality of the building, which as noted earlier was only completed in 1953. Apart from the factory and the pitch attached to it, the film shows only the working class residential districts and the Socialist Realist architecture of the buildings of these districts or the historic city center of Budapest, which is occupied by athletes wearing red stars on their jerseys, pioneers waving their ties or holding portraits of Stalin, Lenin, and Rákosi, and policemen wearing Soviet-style uniforms. Another sign of the appropriation of space is the fact that during the holiday at Lake Balaton factory workers also compete in sailing, which was traditionally regarded as an aristocratic and bourgeois pastime.

Retouched Soccer History: The Football Star

One Title, Two Films

The recipe for Try and Win (a Socialist Realist narrative, the application of techniques of representation suiting the spirit of the age, the use of a new generation of actors together with actors who had been popular before World War II, and the recycling of cinematic traditions inherited from an earlier period) was used again in subsequent films by Keleti.27 In addition to works depicting ideologically informed representations of the world, Keleti also shot historical movies in this period. One of these films, Up with the Head, has a special significance in historical memory, as it was the first feature film in Hungary that took the history of the persecution of Jews as its theme. The theme of sports gained particular emphasis again in 1956, when Keleti started shooting The Football Star. The public response to this film was peculiarly affected by history. While his previous film on soccer represented the world of club soccer in Hungary, The Football Star addressed the fame of the Hungarian national team specifically. The film’s theme was based on a real life event, which indicates the international renown of the team and gives some sense of the media environment of the age. In 1954, the Hungarian press reported that a certain László Veréb had impersonated József Zakariás, a midfielder on the Hungarian national team, in order to secure a contract with Olympique Lille, but one match had been enough to expose him.28 In order to appreciate the historical context of the film, it is worth noting that the image of the national team changed significantly between 1954 and 1956 as a result of the loss in the World Cup final in 1954, after which the reputation of the team started to deteriorate. In fact, when Keleti was shooting the film (between June 18 and August 27, 1956), the “Golden Team” was on the verge of breaking up. Gusztáv Sebes, who put together the team and coached the players on 69 occasions between 1949 and 1956, had had his last match with them on June 9, 1956. When the new coach, Márton Bukovi, managed the team for the first time on 15 July, only four of the players who had participated in the legendary match against England in 1953 entered the pitch. In all likelihood, Keleti had intended to uphold the team’s fame,29 but the film failed to achieve this goal. The premiere was supposed to be held on November 8, 1956, but it was cancelled due to the outbreak of the revolution a few days before. The film lay in a box for some time, and a handful of scenes were re-shot with new actors in 1957. (Ferenc Puskás was replaced by Nándor Hidegkuti, for example.) While some scenes were retained, the sound was altered, clips showing the game were changed, and the photographs were retouched. The new version of the film was eventually screened in cinemas in September 1957. Hungarian television channels broadcast the original version only after 1989.30 Subsequent DVD editions first featured the original film, but since 2016, both versions have been available.

 

A Parodic Use of One’s Heritage

The Football Star31 can be regarded as an exemplary case in historical memory not only because of the differences between the two versions, but also because one can recognize references to events, figures and discourses of both interwar and postwar Hungary in both iterations. The fact that The Football Star entered into a dialogue with Try and Win is obvious from the juxtaposition of the two opening sequences. The opening scene of Try and Win features commentaries about a Hungarian championship match, whereas in the opening scene of The Soccer Star the national teams of two imagined countries (Footballia [Futbólia] and Kickania [Rugánia]) are playing against each other, when one of the Footballia fans exclaims sarcastically, “Civilians on the field!” Keleti invited real sports commentators to act in Try and Win in 1951, while the broadcaster role here is performed by an actor. This decision is symptomatic of a different approach: the openly propagandistic work used real life persons (known journalists and sportsmen) to reinforce the authenticity of the represented world and to affirm the world outside the film. The latter film, however, created a critical distance from the world to which the cinematic narrative refers.32 The Football Star focuses on how soccer becomes intertwined with politics. The commander of the naval fleet of Footballia, Admiral Alfredo Duca, is preparing a military coup, and, at the same time, he tries to increase his popularity among the masses. He uses soccer to achieve this goal: on the pretext of the supporters’ demonstrations following the defeat of the team, he takes control over soccer, and with the help of a Hungarian “soccer star” he tries to make the national team successful again using every media channel to let people know that these successes came about only because of him. Whereas in Try and Win the upper echelons of politics only appear implicitly (for example through the pictures of Rákosi), The Football Star’s story explicitly portrays a conflict between the leaders of an imagined country. The radio commentator of the match in the opening sequence of the film introduces the politicians in the presidential box in the following manner: “The great figures of our country […] are exhorting our team to play with all their might.” Even though the Latin-sounding names, the top hats, and the monocles of the politicians conjure up images from the distant past, the introduction of Duca’s character as “a friend and patron of soccer and the commander of our glorious fleet” encourages a satiric-allegorical interpretation and evokes references to the Minister of Defense of the Rákosi era, Mihály Farkas. The way in which the film stages the rise and fall of Duca can also be compared to Farkas’s career, who belonged to the inner circle of the Rákosi regime. Farkas’s decline started in 1953, when he temporarily lost all his positions. He regained some of them due to Soviet pressure, but in the summer of 1956, when the shooting began on the film, he was already a fallen politician: he had been expelled from the Communist party, he lost his rank in the military, and he was eventually arrested in October. When the retouched version of The Football Star was presented in cinemas in 1957, he was already in jail, like Duca at the end of the film. This partly explains why the early Kádár regime decided to release the film in 1957. The political system intended to consolidate its power by eliminating the legacy of Stalinism in Hungary. János Kádár also played an active role in removing Farkas from his positions in 1956. The fact that from Farkas’s perspective the summer of 1956 was nothing like 1951 is also reflected in the relationship between Márton Keleti’s two sports films. Try and Win also featured the character of Feri Dunai, a character who resembled Mihály Farkas and represented the role played by the military in sports. However, while Dunai, the representative of the party, appeared as a symbolic father-figure, Duca, whose name alliterates with Dunai, is an explicitly negative character. His character bears resemblances not only with the communist Minister of Defense, but also with the memory of Miklós Horthy in at least three aspects: 1. Admiral Duca at the top of his career is promoted to a rear admiral;33 2. as the leader of the army he tries to gain political power; 3. he has a tattoo on his forearm.34 The amalgamation of the memories of Farkas and Horthy in a single character constituted a gesture which would have been unimaginable before 1956 in Hungarian cinema.

There are further examples of symbols that were promoted in Keleti’s film in 1951 but were parodied half a decade later. While in The Football Star the poems, songs, portraits, workers’ choirs, and school compositions (which imitate the ode-like tone and dubious quality of such “works of art” created under the dictatorship) greeting the fake soccer player and the admiral have a comic effect, Try and Win presents the MHK marching song and the portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Rákosi on the walls of the community room of the iron factory as indispensable components of the social reality of the time. In addition, The Football Star presents the career which is based not on knowledge but on loyalty to the system satirically. At Footballia’s government meeting, Admiral Duca presents his new program for soccer, but it eventually end in failure due to a lack of knowledge and experience:

 

Duca: Gentlemen! First of all: Coach Rodrigo will be thrown out. We will appoint Captain Venturo, my adjutant, as the state trainer.

Venturo: But Admiral! I am no professional.

Duca: Reliability is the key this time.

Venturo: Then I will do it.

As part of the media campaign to popularize the film, the film’s scriptwriter admitted the following in the spring of 1956:

 

[I should have written] a satire, yes, but who would have been the target? The confidence-man, who tries something but later gets exposed. This would be the easier solution. But is he the ‘real enemy,’ the most ridiculous? The people who fall for his trick are more amusing, those who are so blinded and deafened by an anti-communist zeal and soccer ardor that they themselves demand and even ‘produce’ such swindlers?

 

Beyond any doubt, Footballia, with its skyscrapers, elegant hotels, lavish saloons, roofed stands, and sports marketing, seemed a distant land to Hungarian society at the time. The fact that the supporters’ devotion to the players can suddenly turn into anger and culminate in violence was quite familiar in Hungary, especially in light of the protests in Budapest following the world cup finals in 1954. After Footballia’s defeat, the angry supporters even throw their seat cushions at the boxes of politicians, at which Duca comments: “This is a rebellion, this is chaos, this is a revolution!” It is needless to emphasize how differently these words must have sounded in 1957 than at the time of their recording in the summer of 1956. The film’s concluding scene allows us to infer why a reference to revolution could remain in the second version of the movie. After the defeat against Cornerland, Duca’s coup attempt also fails miserably. The frustrated fans invade the pitch, the two leaders of the fans on their way home want to get revenge on the “soccer star,” but the radio reporter—freshly out of jail—persuades them not to, because Duca is already in custody. After the rebellion, chaos, and revolution at the end of the film, order is restored, and the people responsible for the scandal are locked up in jail. The national team plays another match one week later, and the supporters wholeheartedly cheer for them again.

 

Rewritten Media Texts: Radio, Film, Photograph

A comparison of the two versions of The Football Star sheds light on why the film constituted a significant mnemopolitical document of 1956 and the following years. The fact that the two title sequences are the same entails many things. The year of production remains 1956 in the second version, thus the creators wanted to erase the temporal distance, the re-editing, and re-shooting. The act of retouching needs to conceal itself. The retouched work is only functional if it steps into the place of the original in a manner that hides the act altogether. The re-dating created the impression that the film was created before the revolution: only those who were well versed in sports could have known that Hidegkuti was actually touring with his team (MTK) in Western Europe in November and December 1956, so he could not have been available for the shooting. This created the impression that dissident soccer players never featured in the film when it was shot in 1956, as if they had not been part of the Hungarian national team at all. In fact, the opposite was true: József Bozsik, Ferenc Puskás, and Sándor Kocsis played the most matches with the team in 1956. Hidegkuti’s name and fame become all the more important in the scene that differs radically in the two different versions of the film. On the plane trip from Footballia to Switzerland, Admiral Duca and his adjutant, the newly appointed trainer Captain Venturo, are listening to a radio broadcast. The scene appears in both versions, and the images of the first 25 seconds are identical, but the voice-over was changed: the radio commentary is different (though we hear the voice of the same reporter), as is the dialogue between the two men. According to the voice-over, it is the last minutes of the 39th Hungarian–Swiss soccer match that is heard on the radio.35 The commentator mentions the names of two players: Puska and Kocsi. These names clearly refer to the two forward players of the Hungarian team, Puskás and Kocsis. Admiral Duca exclaims, “Hear that? Puska! This is our guy.” In the second version of the film the context of the radio broadcast is the same, but the players mentioned are Bozsik and Hidegkuti. The lips of the actor playing Admiral Duca say Puska here, too, but the voice says, “Hear that? Hidegkuti! This is our guy.”

To understand the background of the name change, we need to go back to November 1, 1956. Budapest Honvéd, the team of the Ministry of Defense, left Hungary to train in Western Europe for the matches against Athletic Bilbao. Between the two games, they played other international matches, and after the team dropped out from the European Cup, the players did not return to Hungary. Political and sports leaders asked the former captain of the team, Gusztáv Sebes, to visit the players in the Belgian capital36 and persuade them to come home. Honvéd chose a South American tour in January instead, from which they only returned to Vienna in February 1957. The team also split. Most of the players returned to Hungary, but Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis, and Zoltán Czibor decided to stay abroad. When The Football Star was screened in cinemas, Puskás had been accused of high treason, while Czibor, partly because of the role he played in the revolution of 1956, had good reason not to return home.37 The Hungarian press launched a campaign against Puskás: he was accused of acting as the head of a smuggling network and was considered ungrateful to his country.38 The second version of the film mentions the name of József Bozsik, who joined the South American tour, but returned home when it ended. Hidegkuti also had a chance to remain abroad during the MTK’s tour, but he decided to return home. They became crucial members of the new national team in 1957, and they played key roles in helping the team qualify for the world cup in 1958 in Sweden.39

The 25-second segment analyzed above is followed by images of a match to “verify” the words of the radio commentator. The original version of The Football Star uses a scene from the Hungary–East Germany game on June 20, 1954 in Basel, which was won by the Hungarian team with a final score of 8 to 3. Availability could have been the reason for this choice: the creators of the movie might have had difficulties obtaining the relevant archive footage. In any case, the German-language advertisements in the stadium suited the setting for the Switzerland–Hungary match, even though Lausanne is in a Francophone region, and not in a German-speaking one. The montage shows Grosics, who is playing goalie, kicking the ball out of the goal, Bozsik doing a crossover, Kocsis dribbling, and Puskás scoring a goal after an assist from Hidegkuti. (This was the second goal of the game, scored in the 17th minute.) The inserted footage showed Bozsik and Hidegkuti, too, but they were not mentioned, only “Puska” and “Kocsi.”

How does the 1957 version portray the same scene? It also features a montage about the most famous victory of the “Golden Team,” the victory over London with a final score of 6 to 3. At the beginning, the initial moments of the match are shown: after the kick-off, Bozsik crosses the ball to László Budai, who passes the ball to Kocsis. The following sequence shows a play involving Bozsik, Zakariás, Bozsik, and Hidegkuti, but Hidegkuti does not score the goal from a distance like he did in Wembley. Instead, there is a cut that is almost impossible to notice, and the scene jumps ahead in time and shows his goal that was disqualified because of an off-sides call. Two goals from the Hungary–England game were thus merged into one. There must have been technical reasons for the creators of the film not to have used Hidegkuti’s goal scored in the first minute of the match. (At least, I cannot come up with any other plausible explanation.) Images of the off-sides goal could not have been used extensively, because the goal was preceded by a play between Puskás and Hidegkuti. The players in the two different footages in the two versions of the film are mostly the same—in both cases, the “Golden Team” was on the pitch—but the commentary is different, as only “Buda,” Bozsik, and Hidegkuti are mentioned by name.

In the subsequent scenes two Hungarian immigrant fraudsters (Jóska and Brúnó) and the freshly appointed soccer officials of Footballia (Admiral Duca and Captain Venturo) meet in the hotel where the Hungarian national team is staying. The scene in which Jóska and Brúnó are trying to sell low-quality fountain pens to the soccer players is a reference to the connections members of the “Golden Team” had with émigré tradesmen, and it also highlights the way Hungarian authorities overlooked cases of smuggling which supplemented the “civilian” wages of the players. Although Duca and Venturo have explicit political intentions and their aim is to reinforce Footballia’s national team with the Hungarian forward, their proposal might also remind us of the extremely generous contracts Western European clubs offered players on the Golden Team. In the original version of The Football Star, Jóska and Brúnó are recommending fountain pens to Puska and Kocsi, but the two stars reply wittily:

 

Puska: The pens are garbage.

Kocsi: The deal is not that urgent.

 

The 1957 version of the film included a revised version of the scene. Brúnó offers the pens to Hidegkuti, who repeats Kocsi’s sentence. However, the scene remains slightly less effective than in the original film, due to Hidegkuti’s moderate acting and the absence of extras behind the actors, who might have lent a cheerful atmosphere to the setting. In the original version, the members of the Hungarian team are shown drinking and chatting in the background.

It is worth noting at this point how Hidegkuti remembered the role he played in the film. Hidegkuti came from a social background that was not preferred by the regime. His name was originally spelled Hidegkuthy (the letters “h” and “y” in this name suggest an aristocratic background), but Gusztáv Sebes suggested he change the spelling in order to fit into the team. The young man, who came from a middle-class social milieu in Óbuda and whose mother was a factory director while his father was a nobleman, came to be represented as the child of a distinguished workwoman. The proletarian version of the family story was presented in newsreels, and this narrative was still remembered well after the end of the Rákosi regime, partly because Hidegkuti’s own autobiography—published in 1962—reinforced this image.40 Jóska’s image as a soccer star is similarly reinforced by a wholly fictitious feature film (!) after he arrives in Footballia. While Hidegkuti’s autobiography does not mention The Football Star, he later claimed that “he was persuaded to appear in the movie when he was told that the filmmakers wanted to do the film with Puskás, but Puskás remained abroad. He was very surprised when he learned that these scenes had already been shot with Puskás.”41 One could question the plausibility of this explanation, but one thing is certain: Hidegkuti replaced Puskás in several scenes in the film, so he had an opportunity to verify the story he had heard from the makers of the film.

Who were the other team members who were shown in the scene in the hotel? The reporter of Gazette de Lausanne approaches Puska and asks him about the victory. Then, he takes a group photo for which the soccer players in the background also come forward. The camera does not show them for too long, so not all of them are recognizable, even when the film is scrutinized frame by frame (many of them stand behind others). Duca and Venturo later try to identify the legendary Puska with the help of a photograph with the names in close-up: Fenyő, Gula, Szibor, Buda, Puska, Kocsi, Bozsi, Lórád, Dalnok, Buza, Tilly, Kotál, Mátra. The slightly altered names refer to Máté Fenyvesi, Géza Gulyás, Zoltán Czibor, László Budai II, Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis, József Bozsik, Gyula Lóránt, Jenő Dalnoki, Jenő Buzánszky, Lajos Tichy, Antal Kotász, and Sándor Mátrai: the most prominent members of the national team.

In the 1956 version of the film, Puska’s interview is shot with the four characters facing the camera in a line. As the actor performing Jóska left the country in 1956, he needed to be replaced in the new version. The character had to be near the location of the interview, even though the actor could not be used again. The creators solved this problem by making the characters stand in a circle, and Jóska has his back to the camera (thus, the audience does not see that a different actor is playing the part). His lines concerning the words of the soccer star are spoken by Brúnó and addressed to him (“You hear that Jóska? Good training, half a victory”). Hidegkuti thus took on the roles of Puskás and Kocsis, but since the scene with the group photo was not altered, only shortened, he was not actually present in that sequence in the 1957 version of the movie. While the two-second-long scene is hardly noticeable, it is clear that in a physical sense the second version could not completely erase the “dissident” soccer players from the film: a frame by frame analysis shows that Jóska is accompanied by Zoltán Czibor and Ferenc Puskás, and Sándor Kocsis steps forward from behind the curtain.

The scene in which Duca and Venturo falsely identify the forward based on the photo in the daily newspaper had to be altered as well. (The conflict originates in the film when Puska and Jóska are mixed up, and Footballia’s national team hires not the soccer star, but rather the clumsy “civilian.”) The Admiral and his adjutant compare the names below the photo and the soccer players’ faces and they mention the names of “Fenyő, Gula, Szibor, Buda, Puska.” The newly shot version deleted the pictures of the three soccer players and thus condemned them to oblivion. The scene reused the original photo, but they cut Kocsi(s) from the left side of the image. Szibor’s face also disappeared under an unknown man’s visage, while Hidegkuti’s portrait replaced Puskás’s photo. The filmmakers also made sure that, of the names under the picture, only Fenyő, Gula, Bozsi, and Lórád remained legible for the audience, while the names Szibor and Puska were blurred.

After the selection of the “target,” both films jump forward in time to the Hotel Continental again. The scene shows the elegantly dressed Hungarian soccer players strolling in the hotel corridors. The players are led by Czibor and Puskás, although we need to pause the film in order to recognize them. They are followed by a recognizable Buzánszky, Lóránt, Bozsik, and Budai, while Kocsis does not appear in this section of the film. The 12 second-long sequence was included in the 1957 version without any modifications. The subsequent scene, however, was reshot entirely. In the original film Puska is sitting at a table in front of an ornamented fireplace with Brúnó on his right and Jóska on his left. They are having a conversation:

 

Jóska: Mr. Kocsi?

Brúnó: I promised him a dozen [fountain pens] for today.

Puska: A dozen?

Brúnó: He’s got a big family. They say you like to bring home presents.

Puska: Well, a soccer player’s fame does not last forever. One or two years, one or two matches, you have to live with it while it lasts.

The scene has a crucial role in the narrative because Jóska’s and Brúnó’s knowledge of the world of soccer—knowledge on which they rely after they travel to Footballia—consists of what they learn in this dialogue and the Puska interview. On the other hand, Puska’s arguments in favor of smuggling, euphemistically referred to as “buying presents,” fit the film’s aim to rehabilitate and rebuild the myth of the “Golden Team”: it presents the practice of smuggling, but gives a reasonable explanation for it.

The 1957 version presents Brúnó and Hidegkuti in a similar situation. Jóska’s “double” was not smuggled into this scene, so we hear a dialogue:

 

Brúnó: I’ve brought the fountain pens, a dozen.

Hidegkuti: A dozen?

Brúnó: Yes. They say you like to bring home presents.

Hidegkuti: Well, a soccer player’s fame does not last forever. One or two years, one or two matches, you have to live with it while it lasts.

This particular scene from the second version of The Football Star furthered the attempt to erase the figures (and reputations) of Puskás and Kocsis from the world of cinematic fiction by replacing them with Hidegkuti.

Conclusion

The rivalry among communist leaders in Hungary and the rise and fall of Mihály Farkas in particular were inscribed into the representations in the original versions of Try and Win and The Football Star of the interplay of sports, ideology, and politics. The 1951 film attempted to portray the successes of Hungarian sports as the achievement of the new system, erasing all references to the accomplishments in sports under the Horthy regime. The Football Star depicted in a satirical, critical light the propagandistic use of sports and the ways in which sports contributed to the promotion of a system and its leaders. The almost complete elimination of the dissident soccer players from the 1957 version was the inevitable result of the mnemopolitics of the Kádár regime. Since these players were among the 200,000 Hungarian citizens who fled or chose not to remain in Hungary after the fall of the revolution of 1956, their memory had to erased as well. The erasure of the popular soccer players from cinematic representations of the recent past was part of the process of making the memory of 1956 taboo. The film’s premiere in 1957 was not only about the past and its reinterpretation, it was also about the present and the future. The film was first screened in cinemas when life in Budapest had “returned to normalcy”: entertainment venues opened again, the reorganized Hungarian soccer cup was relaunched, the national team was rebuilt, and in September 1957 the team played twice in the People’s Stadium in front of more than 90 thousand people. The film proved prophetic in the sense that its conclusion shows a world in which soccer is part of mass entertainment, and it is no longer used to pursue a direct political agenda. With the Kádár regime this new “world” came into existence. While the making of the second version of The Football Star implies the political intention of radically rewriting and partially erasing the memory of the most successful Hungarian team, the rehabilitation of Ferenc Puskás in the early 1980s and the 1982 documentary about the “Golden Team” attempted to revive memories of the former achievements by emphasizing their importance in soccer history instead of the political context. At this time, the separation of the memory of the Rákosi regime and Hungarian sports of the era began to take form in the public sphere, and the separation of the two remains very much a part of the popular imagination in Hungarian society today.

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* This article was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.